6. Love Looks like Love

6. Love Looks like Love

People usually punish with the best of intentions. As children, we receive most of our punishments from those who love us.

Of course, it’s those who love you that are interested in correcting you, who want you to grow up as a happy, healthy, productive member of society, and so when you misbehave, they try to steer you on the right path. Unfortunately, most peoples’ choice of tools for such work is rather limited, and all too often, the tool that gets used is punishment; in fact, for some, that’s the only tool in the box. No-one thinks this,’ that it’s the only tool I’ve got, so I guess I’ll use it.’ They believe in it, it’s the only tool they think they need, a kind of wonderful, all-in-one tool that is all you might ever need to correct anyone, anywhere, anytime. The fact that they are trying to correct you, trying to set you up for a happy, productive life, this is believed to make you feel, well, loved. If they didn’t love you, they wouldn’t bother, right? They love you and they’re trying. That’s what parents tell themselves; it breaks my heart to tell them all.

I’m sorry, but it’s not true. Love looks like love.

Don’t be fooled by imitations. Love looks like love. Punishment looks like . . . well, it looks like what it would look like if you couldn’t talk about it, if you couldn’t explain it away. It looks like the opposite of love.

Love looks like patience, like thoughtfulness. Love looks like communication, difficult, cautious, slow communication. Communication with a lot of checking, a lot of error correction, a lot of testing, to make sure the communication is getting through, that the last thing got through before the next thing begins. Whereas punishment is a cheap, shoddy shortcut, whose results are highly dubious. An act of punishment marks the end of communication. I’ve said earlier, punishment is when attempts at communication are abandoned and the teacher, the parent simply resorts to the use of force, to coercion.

Love looks like love. It will be a sad realization if we have to face the truth of this. Unfortunately, many of us may really not know this, and it means, well, maybe we just haven’t seen enough loving correction to recognize it. Maybe we’ve been told how the punishment was good for us for so long we believed it, and started to think that was a sign of love, and perhaps the only sign of love we ever got.

Ouch. That hurt me, and I’m the one who said it! I’ll let that be it for today.

Thoughts?

5. Does Punishment Work?

Despite our nearly complete faith in it to correct a world of wrongs, punishment is inherently inconsistent and unfair, and simply doesn’t work.

Everyone knows it: misbehaviours are not always punished, while correct behaviours are sometimes punished. Sometimes a one-time offender is caught and punished. Sometimes regular offenders go unpunished for long periods. Degree of punishments vary for many reasons, degree of offence not always the operative one.

Of course we've all heard this one: "Don't ever let me catch you doing (insert unwanted behaviour here)!"
This is the key to the failure of punishment to qualify as a "system." This is all anyone needs to learn to avoid punishment, of course: don't get caught. So just like punishment itself is taught with every correction, the intended lesson of every correction is lost to an overriding, works-every-time solution: don't get caught.

That's right. When "corrected" with punishment, two things are learned every time. Punish to correct, and don't get caught! Oh, yes, and something about the DVD player . . .

These are the true lessons in a "system" of punishment.

Alice Miller:

“In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development. “

I'm sure we've all felt the unfairness also. I recently got a speeding ticket. It was $113.00 or so. My attitude was, "OK, 75 in a 50 zone, I gapped out, you got me. Sigh." The cop made a speech, you know you're not supposed to go so fast, you deserve the bigger fine, you were over 20 over, but I'll give you the regular one. Well, it's good I don't think too fast, because by the time I finished getting angry and composed my response, it was over.

Here's what I'm glad I never said:

First, give me the larger fine and save me the lecture. I’m 50 years old, I don’t need to be told I shouldn’t speed (This is the explanation that turns abuse into correction). Second, this is a crime the police enforce about 1% of the time!

 I’ve put on a few kilometres driving, and people driving at or under the speed limit is pretty rare. The police just randomly give out invoices. Does anyone believe they are actually trying to systematically enforce the speed limit, or rather, that they think what they do will actually accomplish it? More to the point of my idea here – have they accomplished it?

Of course the answer to that last one is “no.”

Further to that, it’s not just speeding. Has the justice system generally stopped crime, period? No, of course not. It’s a cycle of ‘crime and punishment,’ repeated endlessly, and of course it’s not different from the other cycle, the cycle of violence.

I respect police officers generally, don’t get me wrong, they’re putting their lives on the line. They’re trying, they’re really trying, but I’m sorry to say it, they’ll never work themselves out of a job. That’s because they’re part of the cycle of violence.

Violence breeds violence, authorized or not, and the very idea we have to solve it is actually half of the cycle.

Punishment only appears to work, and only in the short term.

When punishments ‘one-answer-fits-all’ lesson, don’t get caught, is employed, wrongs are simply hidden, we misbehave out of sight. When we punish a young child’s errors and the child learns not to get caught, he or she may simply continue down their wrong path out of sight, and we will have lost any future opportunity for actual correction; a young child’s honest mistake can go ‘underground,’ possibly for years, until a toddler’s error becomes an adult’s crime! This, and we the adults have let that child down, failed him when he was very young and utterly dependant on the adults in his life, created the situation through our unassailable belief in a “system” that simply doesn’t live up to its purpose.

Punishment has been in use for the whole period of human civilization, it is referenced throughout the bible, the oldest of books, and the foundation of much of human history. The earliest book of the bible appears to concern the agricultural revolution, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, which seems to have occurred some 10,000 years ago. So that is the period during which we know that we’ve used a system of punishment to control behaviour, to correct deviations and make us safe from crime. 10,000 years.

I think we’ve given it a pretty fair trial run. When will we be ready to say it hasn’t stopped misbehaviour or crime?

4. Training versus Teaching

Punishment as Teaching

Training your children is a dangerous shortcut.

It's normal to want to train your kids, it's seen as necessary in order to keep them safe. I wanted to be able to stop my kids with a word, for situations like when a little one is heading for a cliff, or into traffic. Lucky for me, and for them, I changed my mind before my first daughter could walk. So we never trained them for that conditioned response. Result: a lot of hard work. We never really let them out of our sight, we've never had the luxury of giving them an order to stay put and then been able to give a majority of attention to anything else. We were always following them around, doing the leg-work to keep them safe.

Another result: now we have teenagers who still talk to us, who still are willing to listen. Communication lines are still open, and communication has always been enough. For years now, I can say with honesty, punishment has not even been a valid alternative. It hasn't been even . . . applicable. The times when it might have been are long gone by.

Alice Miller:

“Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.”

As I've said, punishment occurs when communication ends, and the authority figure resorts to some kind of coercion. When this occurs in a teaching situation, the teaching has turned to training. Training has other definitions, but this is the one I'm using: teaching by force.

 Several points about this kind of training:

Training teaches punishment, as violence breeds violence; indoctrination in the use of punishment comes free with every other lesson. No matter what the subject matter, if punishment is part of the process, part of what we learn is power dynamics, or 'might is right.' Punishment is taught continually this way, so that it's very effectively what is most taught, taught more often than anything else. Of course not that every arithmetic lesson or cooking lesson is taught with punishment, but behavioural things are. Early childhood stuff is: bedtimes, naps, eating, toilet training, and mostly, misbehaviours. For many of us, everything on that list will have had some punishment included with the lessons, and probably everyone will have had with the last one, with having our young misbehaviours corrected. The number of these instances will help to explain why belief in punishment generally is so prevalent, and virtually unquestioned.

Alice Miller:

“The claim that mild punishments (slaps or smacks) have no detrimental effect is still widespread because we got this message very early from our parents who had taken it over from their own parents. Unfortunately, the main damage it causes is precisely the broad dissemination of this conviction. The result of which is that each successive generation is subjected to the tragic effects of so called physical "correction." “

Training doesn't leave a lot of room for new learning, doesn't have any 'test for truth.' The trainee learns what is taught, or else. The right answers are the trainer’s answers, and that's the only check for the validity of the knowledge imparted, therefore, different trainer, different knowledge. Bad information can be learned as easily as good, and must be learned. It is far too easy for me to become expansive, to see far-reaching implications of this. Bad information can be passed peacefully also, of course, but first, the 'might is right' lesson isn't included, and second, the bad data can more easily be audited later on, without unconscious fear of punishment.

Training establishes a power dynamic, one in which the trainees - our children, for instance - are the ones taking the orders, the ones who have been conditioned to obey. This has long been a central tenet of child-rearing, the point of it, but it has a down-side, and a big one. The trained child grows up as a follower, set up, ripe and ready, to be led by everyone, not just his or her well meaning parents. Here's some potential leaders.

In childhood or youth:

peer groups

gangs

paedophiles

pornographers

cults

pimps

smugglers

military recruiters

And as adults:

all of the above

politicians

dictators

As before, there are certainly more, and perhaps some on the lists are questionable, but the general idea is there, and my opposing idea is implicit: un-punished children, children taught and not trained will be more able to avoid future abusive situations and be more able to think for themselves. And I submit, they will be happier.

Miller again:

“Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other dictators were exposed to severe physical mistreatment in childhood and refused to face up to the fact later. Instead of seeing and feeling what had happened to them, they avenged themselves vicariously by killing millions of people. And millions of others helped them to do so.”

Of course, she’s talking about severe mistreatment, but there’s a principle there; no amount of poison is actually good for you.

.

Enough on this, probably more later.

3. Non-violent Punishment

Non-violent Punishment

I said "Punishment is violence." That needs some explanation.

One might say that these things are not violence: confiscation of a desired object, a favourite toy; "time-outs"; temporary withdrawal of affection. On first glance, this appears to be true, but it's a little more complicated than that. For the purpose of this talk, I'll keep it to children, and exclude the criminal justice system for the time being.

How are these non-violent punishments made to happen? How does a timeout happen? The child is consulted, convinced, and serves his or her time-out willingly? I submit that the time-out has to be enforced. The child is made to understand that it's going to be the time-out or something worse. If the child is stubborn, intractable, then the time-out is ultimately backed up with at least force: holding the child in the chair, locking the child in a room, or a closet (confinement, in adult criminal terms), threats of violence (intimidation), or at worst, actual violence (assault). The same goes for confiscation of the desired object (theft). All of these methods are intrinsically backed up by the threat of violence, either that, or they can only be carried out on an agreeable, willing child, i.e. one who didn't probably require any correction in the first place.

Slaps and pinches count as violence. I would define punishment as the point where communication is abandoned and coercion is invoked. Any little violent act qualifies for that.

I'll take a more personal tack for a moment regarding this point, that all punishment relies on implied violence.

I have seen many young parents say that they do not plan to hit their kids. They feel that although it was done to them, they resent their parents for it and doubt that it made them better people. Most haven't thought it through, however, and they retain all parents' expectations: that the child will behave, will cooperate, the child will get ready and get in the car when the parent has an appointment, that the child will eat when it's a family mealtime, that the child will be quiet when the grown-ups are talking, things like that. These young parents provided this cooperation (or else!) for their own parents, and consciously or unconsciously expect it from their kids, and their parenting plan is non-violent punishment. Time-outs, etc., are the plan, but they quickly learn what I've said above: the child is rarely a willing participant in these schemes, and that the time-out can't happen without some kind of enforcement.

They quickly learn that non-violent punishment is a myth, indeed, a joke. Even child-rearing books I've seen do not address this point. Non-violent punishments (euphemistically labeled "consequences") are an oxymoron. There is a pretty large industry of child-rearing literature that simply re-languages punishment and ignores this unpopular, logical fact.

 It is at this point in the young parents' experience where they "realize their parents were right!" For me this has always been a sad thing. The parent is caught in a horrible choice. It seems like it's either "hit them, or teach them nothing," and all the help, all the literature and the support systems reinforce that dilemma. I don't mean to single her out, I really don't think she's one of the bad ones, but Barbara Coloroso was no help to me or my wife with this apparent conundrum either.

The "third way" is hidden, buried under a lot of emotion, a mother-lode of denial, but it's obvious to logic: There is no non-violent punishment, so in order to avoid violence, avoid punishment. Avoid all  punishment, period. That bears repeating:

There is no non-violent punishment. Therefore, in order to avoid violence, avoid punishment. Period.

It is possible. If we can think it - not easy, I know - we can do it. More on both later, thinking it and doing it, but we need to understand it. To summarize:

1. Violence is harmful - abuse is damaging to the psyche, especially to developing psyches, that is, children.

2. To minimize damage to a child's psyche, avoid violence.

3. Punishment is violence - non-violent punishment is a myth, an oxymoron.

4. To avoid violence and its damaging effects, avoid punishment.

I think I'm not going to go into the psychology of abuse here. Firstly, I'm not a psychologist. Secondly, there is a great deal of psychological information out there, and plenty of psychologists. Any psychologist who would like to chime in here, help me or correct me, is certainly welcome to do so.

Another personal observation, the one that got me started on this line of thought: everyone has problems. I heard a great deal of talk while growing up and in adulthood about the various types of abuse people were suffering from and seeking support for. Here's a partial list:

Alcoholic fathers

Alcoholic mothers (and, of course, both)

Abandonment by parents

Physical abuse

Sexual abuse

Verbal abuse

Too high expectations

Too low expectations

Uncaring parents

Controlling parents

Of course, there are more, and of course, some of those are questionable. But what I started to see, was similar types of problems, as well as the perception that everyone seemed to have some kind of problem, and I started wondering if there may be a common cause, some kind of abuse everyone was suffering but that no-one was naming.

Well, I think I've found it, and this is it: punishment is violence, punishment is abuse. My unification theory of psychology, my single answer to a thousand riddles.

I think that's good for today. Anyone still with me?

2. Violence breeds Violence

Violence breeds Violence

Violence breeds violence. It’s something, I think, that all peacemakers can agree on.

Psychoanalytic thought tells us that abuse and trauma are damaging to the psyche, and to a person’s development. In simple language, we often say that an abused person “has problems.” It is often considered that an abuser was him or herself, abused. Here’s Alice Miller:

“It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim. Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person. “

Therefore we are often baffled when some person commits acts of violence, and we often note that no abuse or violence was committed against the offender. This situation brings up theories of video game violence and TV/movie violence, or genetic predisposition etc., but I think the explanation is much simpler.

Punishment, a staple of civilization, a common practice in nearly all societies used to encourage acceptable, moral, and responsible behavior – is violence.

We've almost all been subjected to it as children, and some of us as adults. Although not all have had physical violent abuse in their childhoods, the exercise of punishment, in any form, can be shown to be a form of abuse. The theory of punishment makes the exercise of punishment necessarily, let's say, unpleasant. What is the "Theory of Punishment," then?

Simply put, it is the idea that to discourage unwanted behavior, parents and authority figures somehow make things unpleasant for the person or child engaging in the unwanted behavior. Fair definition?

This unpleasantness can take many forms. Violence, certainly is the most obvious, and is for many people in these times, perceived as wrong. Most of us rightly perceive that violence is one of the wrongs that they are hoping to correct, rather than a legitimate tool of correction. There are also many others: the removal of a desired object, temporary restriction of the child or person's freedom to go about as they wish, or a display of disapproval, which may include the threat of violence, or the suspension of affection (withdrawal of love) from a parent for a child.

The success of the use of punishment depends on the subject’s knowledge that the unpleasantness is coming, so that he or she may alter their actions to avoid the consequence. Therefore, there must be a warning, an explanation of the process, “you do this, you  get that.” The explanation, and/or simple repetition connect the behavior to the punishment, and the person or child learns to change their ways, and so the child or person's behavior is improved, hopefully in the long term. Again, fair definition?

I think what we see in many cases, however, is the dark side of the equation.

Often noted, but rarely appreciated, is the following:  many methods of corrective punishments, indeed, all of them, qualify as crimes if used upon undeserving adults! Acts such as theft, assault, battery, intimidation and confinement, this is what these acts are called, when perpetrated by private citizens, upon adults, or upon children but when not spoken of as "corrective" or "educational." These acts, the punishments and the crimes, often appear identical. In fact, to the person on the receiving end, it’s often only the explanation associated with punishments which differentiates the act at all.For the punishers, it seems the difference is in the intent. More on this later.

This brings me to define two types of violence, the “authorized” and the illicit, or “unauthorized.” Illegal, unauthorized violence is fairly self-explanatory, the kind the police are there to stop, the kind that gets you put in jail. The authorized kind is the kind the police and the courts deal in themselves, the kind parents and authorized adults are routinely permitted to do to children – punishment, in a word.


"Violence breeds Violence" is a widely accepted psychological tenet –but a truism whether the violence is of the unauthorized variety or not. The idea holds true either way. Here's a sort of "truth table" for it:

1. Unauthorized violence breeds unauthorized violence
 - how everyone understands the expression now, criminally abused people growing up to be violent criminals.
2. Unauthorized violence breeds authorized violence
 - like a criminally abused child growing up to be a prison guard, a policeman, a prosecutor, a soldier, or simply a "normally" punishing parent.
3. Authorized violence breeds unauthorized violence
- like a "normally" punished child, or someone who’s paid a debt to society in jail or prison, becoming a violent criminal.
4. Authorized violence breeds authorized violence
 - like an ex-convict becoming a policeman, a soldier, etc., or simply the repetition of "normal" punishment by successive generations of parents.

Psychology has put forth the idea that abuse and trauma are damaging to people, particularly developing people, that is children. I think this broad idea is largely accepted among the majority, at least in the western world. There is a lot of material about it, and types of abuse and its effects are many and well documented.

So, if we're being scientific about it, on the theory that ‘action speaks louder than words,’ we would think it's the acts that hurt, the acts that cause any damage (emotional, physical, psychological) to victims, irrespective of the name given to the acts. So, authorized violence would be as damaging to people, and by extension, to society in general, as the illegal kind of violence, modified of course where there is a difference in a matter of degree, or of frequency.
It is probably true to say that the degree of violence in cases of the unauthorized kind, is higher, but it would also be true, and quite significant, to realize that the frequency of the authorized type of violence, especially in child-rearing situations, is also higher. I hope to make this clearer later.

That's all for today. Anybody still with me this far?

1. New Blog Regarding the Concept of Punishment

Introduction:

This blog - my first attempt at a blog - is dedicated to the idea that the concept of punishment is flawed in its core assumptions, holds a central role in nearly all societies, and that its role is more destructive than productive.

I must credit the great psychotherapist, Alice Miller, she changed my mind and my life. I think I’m taking one more step with her ideas, a step she wisely didn’t take (maybe she did, I haven’t read everything she ever said or wrote), that is going after punishment in general, that is to say, almost everybody. Alice speaks of abuse and mistreatment, which I think let a lot more people in to her thoughts, whereas I expect to piss nearly everyone off.

I’d like to think she approves, but I absolutely absolve her of all responsibility for my actions here.

Unclear on how to proceed, I think what I'll do is make a separate posting for each of several points in my argument, to keeps things clear and points separate in the sphere of a subject that obviously will be very emotional for many people.

I'll throw out a statement and attempt to explain it, one in each post. See how that goes.