Melody's got an Oprah playing in the next room and I've been listening in. And I'm just furious. In the rush to assign blame for domestic violence we ignore the real cause and guarantee that it will happen again and again. The same people who laugh at Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign (well not all of them because I laughed at it, too) seem to think the answer to violence is to just say no.

It's not that Oprah and the rest are clueless, its just that they refuse to open their eyes.

I know what we all learned about T/F questions that have 'all' or 'never' in them, but this time the correct answer is TRUE.

People (like the other animals on this planet) don't get angry until they are hurt, or even worse, believe they are about to be hurt. If you don't think that watching your relationship, your world, dissolving out from underneath you is painful, well, I don't know what planet you are from. It's horrific. It questions everything you have tried to believe about yourself. A woman in that situation is angry, too. If her fear shows up as physical aggression, no one will ever know. A man will absorb the rage and certainly not report it. It's more likely that in the failing relationship her anger will just mean she is cold, distant, and unsupportive. Or she may be looking for a verbal fight where she wins control by emotionally punishing the man until he simply can't bear it any more and must resort to violence to regain control.

Or, hopefully, walk away. From his wife, his life, his children, pets, home, everything. I did. I still spent a night in jail because leaving isn't even enough in this county, if you take your children with you.

So, I don't think it does any good to point fingers, particularly around our romantic relationships where even the participants usually don't understand what is going on. I'd rather focus on the solutions.

Much of it hinges on the concepts and understanding that are the basis of the Great Sex Seminars. They provide a way out of the mad cycle. You can be sure I'll blog about that later on.

One other area that really is a tragedy and sets up so many marriages for failure is the way so many boys are abused. They are forced to live in emotional deserts. If we didn't teach them from such a young age that their feelings were less than worthless, that they needed to be kept hidden where no one can know, then maybe they would be better equipped to survive relationships. They might even thrive.

Domestic violence is so misunderstood. We all just want it to go away. Somehow we imagine that if we punish the perpetrators harshly enough, it will stop. This attitude is clear when supposedly fair minded people like Oprah are prompted by the Rihanna and Chris Brown incident to declare that a man who will hit you once will hit you again.

I'm reminded of a recent incident my son had at school. You see, they have a zero tolerance policy for socially unacceptable behavior. Well, there was a "mouthy" (principal's word, not mine) girl calling my son names and generally harassing him. She just wouldn't leave him alone no matter what he said. Until he used the "N" word. I suppose if my son were black, it would have been OK. Instead he gets three days suspension. Oh, and the girl who was verbally abusing him, well she didn't do anything wrong! In the workplace, this would be considered harassment and as an adult you could choose to leave. Not as a student. You have to stand and take the pain from the bully until you retaliate enough to be singled out by the authorities. A high price to pay for personal safety, don't you think? What message do you think our schools are sending to kids like my son?

What does this have to do with domestic abuse? When we start to believe there is something in a relationship that fulfills some deep primal need for love, acceptance, touch, or whatever your personal need happens to be (I need all of it!) then that relationship becomes super-charged and dangerous. We give up power. We confess our needs. And when it seems they withhold what we need, we get very scared (remember ALL anger is based on fear that something bad is about to happen). We believe this person has the power to make us safe and maybe even happy. Not only won't they give us another fix of what we need, they are also heaping pain (more fuel for the fear/anger).

And if we leave, we lose all chance of having the comfort and safety we desperately need. Just like my son, we have to stand there and take it until we go far enough that someone intervenes. Often that means somebody (almost always the man) gets hauled off to jail and criminal charges. The other "partner" is declared the "victim" of this violent, depraved animal.

Assigning blame

Society, the police, and county prosecutors jump on the bandwagon. They quickly become a tool for the victim to continue beating on the perpetrator. It doesn't take much compassion for what someone like Chris Brown before you start wondering why there aren't more murders after domestic violence arrests and prosecutions. Presumably its because the perpetrators are forced to realize that their expectation of love and support from the "victim" wanes.

Trying to make the relationship is every bit as dangerous for the "perpetrator" as the victim. Their wounds heal much slower than any physical harm they caused.

Oprah's not wrong, just wrong-headed

It's not that I really disagree with what Oprah said, I just would add that a partner who ignores your pain to the point you have to resort to violence to stop it, will abuse you again.

You see, they are both victims, or at least they are acting like victims. We prefer to call the perpetrator a "self-protector." Like my son, they were just trying to stop the pain. Don't they have a right to that? In the self-protector role they are very hard to connect with emotionally. As a result, they don't have much protection when they let someone close. Just as my son is probably too sensitive because he generally doesn't expose himself to tough situations (bullies like that girl delight in find a soft spot) the self-protector is not very well equipped to deal with the skinned knees and bruises that are part of every relationship.

On the other hand, the victim wouldn't be inflicting such roaring pain on their partner if they weren't scared themselves.

Our Great Sex Online Seminar is such a powerful tool for letting couples get past their protective armor, that even experienced couple counselors are using it in their own relationships to get past obstacles that have haunted them for years.

What could it do for someone you know?

Who is to blame?

In a what her lawyer refers to as a “silly” case involving Joel Olsteens’ wife, Victoria, a litigious flight attendant has filed charges against Mrs. Olsteen. The flight attendant, Sharon Brown, claims injury after Mrs. Olsteen allegedly pushed her against the bathroom door and elbowed her breast. Mrs. Olsteen was apparently upset that her flight attendants had not attended her so well. Someone had spilled a liquid on the arm of her first class seat and none of the attendants would anything about it. Reportedly, Mrs. Olsteen became quite upset and demanded some attention to her needs.

I love this kind of thing because it so clearly illustrates how even the (apparently) most evolved of us can get triggered into primitive responses and look like idiots. Now, I don’t know if Mrs. Olsteen actually did as Ms Brown claims, but clearly the women were upset. Neither of them chose to respond, both were, rather clearly operating from a survival mechanism that resulted in both feeling hurt and angry.

Survival mode

When this kind of primitive response kicks in our brains don’t work so well. Ms Brown has apparently been involved in other disputes of this kind so I am guessing she has a bit of the Self-Protector in her and doesn’t have a clue how this impacts other people. Not that it justifies the reported behavior of Mrs. Olsteen. But it does help us understand and have some empathy for her frustration.

I can picture it now. The beautiful and extremely well dressed Victoria Olsteen gets on a plane expecting to be comfortable and well taken care of as is reportedly the usual case in first class (though I certainly wouldn’t know for sure). She sits down in an outfit that is undoubtedly worth more than everything in my entire closet combined and discovers something on the arm of her chair that could ruin her designer garb. She asks for help since this is not really her territory; it’s the flight attendants. Yet she gets no response. She can’t get comfortable and knows she will not be able to relax until the foreign substance is removed. She asks for help again and now she is getting panicked. How is she going to manage to be in a plane for (however long) and relax?

The flight attendant, Ms Brown, obviously rushed, and stressed views Mrs. Olsteen as an obstacle to her goal of getting the flight off the ground. Both went into Self-Protect mode firing angry reactivity toward each other and hurting each other’s feelings.

At any point if one or the other had been able to contain their reactivity and have some empathy for the other person the whole incident could have been avoided. Of course, the onus to be responsible for the incident really lies with Ms Brown as a representative of the airline and a servant to the people on her flight.

A need for compassion

It seems to me that both of these women could use a course in the practice of compassion. Once they both moved into a place of empathy, respect and ownership the whole necessity of legal action would be removed. If Mrs. Olsteen did physically assault Ms Brown than she needs to apologize and take ownership of her part, but so does Ms Brown. Her job as a flight attendant to first class riders is to be there to take care of them.

Clearly she failed to do that. If there was no assault (only the other witnesses on the flight can say for sure) it would behoove Mrs. Olsteen to listen with empathy to what could have provoked this legal attack on her. Perhaps Ms Brown is financially stressed and saw this as an opportunity to help her recover financially from some terrible financial problem. Perhaps Ms Brown wanted to please Mrs. Olsteen and was hurt at how angry Mrs. Olsteen was by her failure to respond. Whatever the cause, both women own a part in what happened and if that is not recognized in the legal process it certainly should be in some kind of moral or ethical sense. I hope the Olsteens can recognize this because it changes everything. Once you allow yourself to step into compassion and out of the egocentric combatant role everything changes.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear what you think of this. Do you think Mrs. Olsteen was the bad actor in this case, or is this a case of overblown litigiousness? Did Ms Brown fall short of her job duties and cry foul to save her job? Comment below.

Searching out the bad guys

Who’s to blame? That’s what we all want to know isn’t it. When something goes wrong our primitive nature seeks out the source of the crime. We want to know who or what is to blame so that we can put the whole issue to rest. Whatever the issue.

Last weeks Newsweek contained an article by Stuart Taylor Jr. about how looking for blame in regard to the problem of torturing suspected war criminals in the United States military over the past seven years cannot be approached this way. He has gotten some flack from readers about his no blame approach. But I think he is 100% correct.

The pattern of blame

When we spend all our time in search of the bad guy, trying to figure out who should go to jail, who should be prosecuted. People always automatically go into Self-Protector mode. This causes anyone involved to go behind a veil of silence, protecting them from possible trouble that could result if they were to come clean.

At this point the government has prosecuted only those at the lowest level of the abuse; those acting under orders in an atmosphere encouraging such behavior.

Should they have known better?

Sure, but then again, so should those prosecuting them.

The problem, as Taylor points out, is a systemic problem that cannot be solved merely by pointing fingers. In fact as those involved fear for their freedom and their careers will band together to protect themselves from harm. Wouldn’t you?

Our survival nuture

It is our nature, when under attack, to fight for our survival. The problem is that because we live in a world where nothing exists except Self-Protectors, Victims and Rescuers then Taylor must be seen as a Rescuer. Victims don’t like Rescuers who are rescuing the perceived perpetrator.

Is this Rescuing?

Rescuing is when you take over, with no respect for the other, and hold them irresponsible for their deeds. This is NOT what Taylor is calling for at all.

Taylor’s premise is that we must examine the problem from inside the system, recognizing that something went wrong in the system and holding each person accountable for their part, but not to “blame”. Giving everyone involved immunity allows us to step back and look at the whole problem of how this travesty occurred in our supposedly “free” American society.

Any other approach leads to more secrecy, more scapegoats, and more travesties.

Practicing Compassion

Coming from a compassionate place where we recognize that within a system where abuse is as normal as eating, finding blame is useless. It’s like the whole dysfunctional family trend of the early ‘90’s. We’re miserable, so who’s to blame? Why our parents of course! Anyone who survived this period of time in psychotherapy will attest to what this cost them personally within their family systems.

Practicing compassion means holding people accountable without blaming them for the entire blame. Certainly no one person made the decision to allow the kinds of tortures we have read about since the beginning of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Respecting that each person within the system did what they thought was correct, legal actions at the time; we allow them to speak of how the horrors came to be. We have empathy for how difficult it might have been to have broken from the status quo to protest. In doing this own that what happened should not have happened and take ownership of preventing any further, similar horrors to occur.

Compassion requires allow us to be human beings. It allows us to make mistakes, yet holds us accountable for our behavior. It changes how we perceive everything.

Should we pursue the bad guys

What do you think? Am I off base? Is Taylor? I know some of you have to be irate at the thought of “letting them off” for such awful deeds. Tell me what you think. Comment below.

Blame, blame whose got the blame?

There was a story on CNN this morning about a dozen police officers beating 3 bound “suspects”. This was apparently caught on video so there is no question of what they did. Community leaders are going at it trying to place the blame. Some are blaming it on race, saying the police officers beat them because they are black. Local appear to agree because they claim this happens all the time. The police claim that stress is to blame. The officers involved had just lost one of their own that had been slaughtered on the streets on Saturday. One of their spokesmen claim the murder set the officers up to lose it on the men they were arresting.

Fear

When we understand that fear is always underneath these outbursts it changes everything. The men they arrested had just opened fire on a crowd and this is why the police arrested them in the first place. I can only imagine the adrenalin rush going through these officers after having witnessed this kind of an attack. Granted, they are supposed to be well trained enough to avoid such a travesty, but fear is a primal reaction that often has nothing to do with how we have been trained or even what we believe to be appropriate behavior.

Odds are, the men they arrested were behaving the way they did out of fear as well. I don’t know if they were gang members, but they likely were. Gangs operate entirely out of fear. The whole basis of belonging to a gang is fear. The members are recruited out of fear. When someone is being recruited the gang terrorizes them into joining, then terrorizes them to keep them from leaving. Yet being a member of a gang puts them at risk for attack by opposing gangs, thereby increasing the members fears. Undoubtedly their opening fire on the crowd was motivated by this fear. Perhaps there was gang member from an opposing gang in the crowd who had promised to kill one of the shooters gang members.

Lessons from Iraq

Perhaps we should be learning from General Patraeus in Iraq. He understands that you can’t win a war on tribesmen by going in and blasting them to hell. We have to look at gangs in the exact same way. They are exactly like opposing tribes and if we don’t look at changing the system, in the way General Patraeus is doing, we will continue to have to deal with the kind of horrors highlighted by this attack in Philly.

Compassion

Compassion means letting go of blame. And I don’t mean standing by while people continue to hurt each other – we have to take ownership and protect ourselves and others from people who are afraid and out of control. But we stop the violence with compassion. We take ownership of the need for protection from their violent behavior, but we do it respectfully and with empathy. We recognize that they are afraid and that they are dealing with it in the only way they know how. We respect that they are doing the best they can, in spite of the awfulness of their behavior. We don’t blame them for their fear, we empathize with it and do our best to take ownership of the situation; meaning we try to change whatever it is that is causing the problems.

How do you see it?

This is what General Patraeus is doing. We desperately need to apply the same things to the wars happening everyday here at home. What do you think? Should we just round up all the “bad guys” and put them in jail or should we try to understand what is happening in the bigger picture and address the real problems? Comment below.

Cult Abuse of Chlldren

What might have happened if the mothers and children of the Branch Davidians had been captured instead of slaughtered that day in April, 1995? Would it have been that different than what is happening today? A cult that uses women and children as their sex slaves in the name of religion is one that cannot be allowed to continue.

What they are brought up to believe

Yet the children, male and female alike, in this bizarre sect have all been brought up to believe in their “faith” s as a natural, precious, and fundamental part of what it is to be a human being. They go about their lives believing, as they have for generations, that this is truth and the way to God’s Kingdom. Each and every one of them is raised to accept this view of themselves and others. They each believe in what they were conditioned to believe since birth. Their accepted worldview rejects or technology, and our modern ways and the knowledge of psychology and the acquired wisdoms of the past 150 years. Ignorance was their choice. It is always the way of cults in general. Outside knowledge of other’s beliefs is not only discouraged but punished. No new knowledge can be allowed into the closed system because new knowledge would destroy the system.

Who is going to be prosecuted?

Do you prosecute the women who were brought up to believe that marrying off your children to much older men is acceptable? Do you prosecute these same women for abandoning their young sons that were thrown out of their “families” because there were too many of them? Do your prosecute the men, who were brought up to believe it is their rightful place to have many young wives and force them to have sex with them as they please?

Clearly Criminal

Clearly all of the above constitute legal abuse and crimes that are normally punishable by law. Yet what happens when we begin to view this case as a case of programming, not unlike that of Patty Hearst? All of the members of this sect were programmed from birth to see their lifestyle as the only choice acceptable by God as they understand him.

Is it our role as a legal community to imprison them for their crimes, as we did Patty Hearst, or is our responsibility to them something entirely different? What if we could view them not as perpetrators of horrors upon innocent victims, but as victims themselves worthy of our compassion?

The Travesty

Some people already are seeing the travesty that is likely to occur to these people and have been protesting outside the courtrooms where we attempt to find “justice” for those our courts are attempting to protect. Unfortunately there are no “bad guys” here to prosecute. The system was the problem, not the people involved. All of these people were caught up in a system that was dangerous and just plain wrong. But there are no bad guys are there?

A different perspective

It changes everything when you try to look a situation from the prospective of compassion rather than the old egocentric view of seeing everyone as a good guy, a bad guy or a victim. When we impose our legal system on these people by prosecuting them for doing what they earnestly believed was the righteous way of living, we become what our forefathers fought against. We as a community become the perpetrators by prosecuting this group for their religious practices.

Clearly abuse is abuse

But what they were doing to their children was wrong. There is no question about that is there? Raping children of the age of 12 or 14, abandoning children (boys) who were not going to be useful in continuing their patterns of multiple marriages to one male is all wrong. Morally and ethically we cannot let it continue, but we have to stop it in a way that does not make anyone a criminal.

Practicing Empathy

We have to put ourselves in their shoes and practice empathy for their situation. There are those in our culture (among whom I count myself) who oppose the everyday practice of circumcision as genital mutilation of our baby boys. It’s as wrong as the genital mutilation of girls that we have outlawed in this country, even when practiced for religious reasons. Yet we continue to practice this primitive mutilation of baby boys on a daily basis all across our nation. It’s okay to do it to boys, but not to girls. I don’t get that at all.

When we consider that the practice of genitally mutilating boys is a natural normal practice in our culture, it makes it hard not to step into the shoes of a cult that sees raping 12-14 year old girls as a natural and normal practice in theirs.

It changes everything when we begin to have empathy for their beliefs and understand that, like us, they have been brought up in a culture which finds some very bizarre practices to be normal and natural.

What do you think?

Is there a difference between taking innocent babies and mutilating their genitals and taking a 12-13 year old girl into a forced marriage and raping them? Can you find empathy for their strange beliefs or do you see them as a sick, perverted culture that needs to be punished? Tell me what you think. Comment below

Gangland Chicago

Chicago has suffered another horrible weekend of what are most likely gang related shootings. 36 people were shot over the course of one single weekend. I don’t know what the numbers were in the 20’s and 30’s when the mafia was running Chicago but I don’t imagine it was any worse than this.

What drives this kind of violence? The police and others want to blame the guns for the problems. I’m reminded of the movie West Side Story when I hear that. They didn’t need guns to kill people. Maybe fewer people get killed, but killing still happens. Blaming the guns doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. When we understand the Cycle of Egocentrism we can begin to see how the horrors of this kind of violence are triggered.

Gangs and the Cycle of Egocentrism

Gangs are the epitome of the Cycle of Egocentrism at work. Someone at some point felt damaged by someone else in a different gang, heck, maybe that is what started the gang in the first place. Maybe someone’s friend was insulted, hurt, or killed by someone (thereby becoming a Victim) and the friend gathered up a bunch of their mutual friends and became a gang (then becoming a group of Self-Protectors). Now they target this other person (another Victim), who in turn gathers up his friends and they became a gang (another group of Self-Protectors). The blame game ensues and all that results is pain and death.

The Cycle and us

How many times in our lives have we become stuck in the Victim/Self-Protector cycle of blame? I know when I got divorced (both times) I was convinced the guy was horrible. I made up all kinds of good reasons that my friends agreed with about how awful they were. And, yes, their behaviors were awful. My friends and I judged them as being to blame for everything that happened in my relationship and I could see no complicity on my part. He was the one that was screwing around, after all. He was the one with the temper. He was the one behaving irresponsibly. I never saw that I owned as much responsibility for what occurred in our relationship as my husbands. I was trapped in the blame game just as surely as those gang members.

The growing divorce rate

The Cycle of Egocentrism explains the growing divorce rate better than any thing else. When we get caught up in a Cycle of Egocentrism we believe we are the Victim, and our spouse is the Self-Protector/Perpetrator. Our only choice is to look for Rescue. A Lawyer makes a good Rescuer. The lawyer starts handing out harsh complaints against our spouse and we feel much better. Of course, then we become the Self-Protector/Perpetrator don’t we? Our spouse then gets so hurt and angry, and they lash back with their own Lawyer. Breaking that cycle is the only way to really change everything.

How are you engaged in the Cycle of Egocentrism?

Have you ever found yourself stuck in blame and battling for survival? If you are or have been caught up in the drama, I’d love to hear how your story turned out. Comment below.