Natural health and healthy eating information

Go Ahead, Be Bad; It's Good for You

By Bill Harris
Director, Centerpointe Research Institute

For some of you, this article is going to be a stretch. For others, it will be a gift of freedom. Those of you for whom it is a stretch probably need the gift of freedom the most. Life is ironic at times.

I just met a very interesting man. His name is Dr. Al Seibert, and he has spent his life researching the subject of resiliency. He often talks about what he calls "the survivor personality." (He has even appeared on Oprah discussing this, so pay attention.)

We had a very electric, idea-packed lunch a few weeks ago, because we found we had been coming at the same topic from different directions and had much insight to offer each other.

As you may know, almost everything Centerpointe does is based on the work of Ilya Prigogine regarding how complex systems (like human beings) reorganize at higher levels of functioning. When this happens, you indeed do become more resilient, more able to deal with whatever comes up in your environment. Another way to put it is that you gain a greater flexibility, where fewer things can throw you off-course, off balance. You become a survivor, to use Dr. Seibert's phrase.

Dr. Seibert has identified a very interesting aspect of this idea of resiliency -- a group of people who have little flexibility, who have trouble dealing with change, and who are often (quite frankly) a pain in the ass to be around.

Who are these people? You'll never guess.

They are people who were brought up to be...

... good.

Dr. Seibert calls it "the good child handicap." Most parents want their children to grow up to be decent, well-liked, and responsible. They don't want their children to turn out "bad." But efforts to create a "good child" unfortunately (according to Dr. Seibert's lifetime of research), often produce an adult who is not able to cope well with life. Such a person is, in fact, very often an energy draining "pain" for others to live and work with.

Are YOU good?

Most people who are survivors, who have this quality of resiliency, of flexibility, have a paradoxical "two-sides-of-the-same coin" collection of traits: selfish-unselfish, pessimist-optimist, sensitive-tough, strong-gentle, distant-friendly, and so on. They have emotional flexibility. In a given situation they have a much bigger repertoire of possible coping skills. They can flow with what is happening much more easily. They have fewer rules -- they make up their own rules as they go along, to fit the situation.

Part of the problem is that most "good child" messages come in the form of prohibitions -- what the parents want the child to NOT become or NOT do. They use "bad" people as anti-models of how to behave, and think they must eliminate and prohibit all traces of bad ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

A good child is one who is:

  • not negative
  • not angry
  • not selfish
  • not dishonest
  • not self-centered or prideful
  • not rebellious

What the child hears is:

  • Don't talk back 
  • Be polite
  • Be good
  • Stop pouting
  • Hang up your clothes    
  • Don't whine
  • Don't hit           
  • Don't fight
  • Share with others      
  • Tell the truth
  • Stop complaining     
  • Smile
  • Don't cry           
  • Stop asking questions
  • Don't be stuck-up   
  • Don't be angry
  • Don't be selfish             
  • Don't chew with your mouth open
  • Don't pick your nose

And so on.

Many are "don'ts," others are "shoulds." All are rules, and the message is "live life by these rules."

Unfortunately, being a good, rule-bound child prevents most people from coping with rapid change, unexpected difficulties, and extreme crises.

Here is part of a letter Dr. Seibert received from Bill Garleb, an ex-prisoner-of-war, after Garleb had read his description of the "good-child" pattern:

"My need to comment is so strong I could not pass it up. When I went to parochial school, as a child, if you changed your mind and could see the other side of something, they accused you of being inconsistent, or "thinking like a woman." In other words, they programmed you to be polarized and one-sided, the opposite of what a survivor personality needs to be to cope. I am overjoyed that I have learned that being biphasic is good. I like myself better now. It is important to note that, although I was trained and programmed as a child not to use biphasic traits, when my survival was threatened, I relied on basic, inborn traits and ignored conditioning."

To survive as an adult, Garleb had to go against how he was raised. his experience is not unusual among survivors. But many people spend their entire life trying to behave like a good child. And just as Prohibition created serious societal problems in the 1920s, children raised with inner prohibitions cause many problems for others.

Some typical actions of a "good" child trying to function in an adult body are as follows. They...

  • Smile when upset
  • Rarely let you know they are angry at you
  • Seldom make selfish requests
  • Point out your faults, saying "I'm only telling you for your own good."
  • Give "should" instructions to others
  • Get upset with you and then say "You really hurt me."
  • Smile and compliment people to their faces but say critical things behind their backs
  • Alert and warn others about "bad" people
  • Cannot accept compliments easily or agree they are good at something
  • When confronted about something hurtful they said, they emphasize their good intentions by saying, "But I meant well."
  • Fear being regarded as hurtful, tough, selfish, insensitive, or uncaring

The irony is they were raised from childhood to be emotional liars. They had to lie about their emotions -- it was what their parents demanded of them. Rather than being emotionally honest, they had to learn to present the "right" emotions and suppress the "wrong" ones.

The result is they come across as two-faced. They smile and agree, then criticize in private. When asked to express a contrary opinion, they are unable to do so -- until they are in private.

Instead of making open requests (which might be seen as being selfish), they hint at what they want. Appeals to get them to ask for what they want, or admit (normal) selfish desires, will have little effect. Though they act in selfish ways, they cannot allow awareness of their selfishness into their consciousness.

They must make sure you do not have the wrong impression of them. To admit normal selfish or angry feelings would be to act like their anti-model: bad.

Here is why these "good" people drain energy our of others and are such a pain to live and work with:

  • They do not give you useful feedback. Even if they are obviously upset or angry, they can't admit it and talk about it. If they do admit it, they have a victim reaction (whiny or angry). They blame you.
  • They are deceptive. they can act in ways that are harmful to you but convince themselves it is for your own good.
  • Their efforts to have others have only good feelings about them often causes the opposite reaction to occur. If they get a negative reaction, they work even harder to get the positive reaction they want -- by doing more of what caused the negative reaction in the first place. their efforts then cause even stronger negative reactions, which leads them to try even harder -- and so on. they do not have the flexibility to try something else, but instead persist with their initial behavior.
  • There is a hidden threat under their efforts to make you see them as good. If you react negatively to their ways of trying to control what others (or you) think and feel about them, they may decide you are a bad person and punish you.
  • they avoid empathy. They become slippery when you try to discuss an upsetting incident with them. they may send you reeling with a sudden accusation. Later, they may say "I don't remember saying that," or give themselves a quick excuse.
  • They have mastered the art of being emotionally fragile. No matter how carefully you try to find a way to get them to listen, have empathy, or observe themselves, they will find a way to become upset. Then they try to make you feel guilty for upsetting them.
  • The "good" person cannot distinguish between constructive and destructive criticism. they react to unpleasant feedback as though it is destructive and has a harmful effect. They believe if you really care for them you will not confront them about their upsetting actions. (This is much different from the flexible, survivor personality who believes that if you care for them you will confront them about their upsetting action so they can learn from the experience.) This is why a "good" person remains at the emotional level of a child throughout life.
  • They feel unloved and unappreciated. Even though you give them lots of love and attention, they experience very little. they can't take it in.
  • They are self-made martyrs. They blame you for the suffering you have caused them, then forgive you so they can feel emotionally superior to you.
  • Confronting them makes things worse. They cannot handle a confrontation about what they do because the victim style is the best they can manage. They have almost no capacity for self-observation or for conscious choices about thinking, feeling, or acting in different ways.

The challenge for someone raised to be "good" is to develop new, additional ways of thinking, feeling and acting. This requires courage because it requires stepping outside the artificial shell of "goodness" into risky, even frightening territory.

Anyone trying to act like a good child is vulnerable to being overwhelmed when faced with challenges beyond the capacities of the "act" they were trained to perform and the rules they were trained to follow. This is why "good" middle class young people, when faced with real world problems, are so vulnerable to cults. After years of being praised for good conduct in school, it feels familiar to again sit passively and listen to an authoritative person tell them how to think, feel, and act in order to be a new kind of "good" person.

Having a flexible, resilient personality, on the other hand, is not a way of being that can be learned from someone else. it is not an act designed to replace the old one. It is, rather, the emergence of innate abilities made possible by learning from experience and flexibly responding to whatever is happening.

Hearing all of this from Dr. Seibert was a revelation to me for two reasons. First, I used to be one of these people, with all the annoying traits he describes. It was, without a doubt, the Centerpointe program and Holosync technology that created a shift for me, that took me from this inflexible "good" boy charade to the more real, and more flexible place I'm in today. This shift has brought me happiness, inner peace, the ability to get along with people, the ability to thrive (one of Dr. Seibert's favorite words) in any situation, greater creativity, and greater productivity in the world. Without a doubt, the Centerpointe program creates what Dr. Seibert calls "the survivor personality." Ironically, I'm genuinely good today, without trying to be. When I was trying to be, I was an asshole.

The second reason is that his description of the "good" child describes my ex-wife (ex for 4 whole days now) to a "T". She was brought up to be a good girl, to follow the rules (boy, does she have rules), and she does ALL the annoying behaviors Dr. Seibert has found in his research. So it brought a little sanity to me to at least understand why she was so difficult to deal with and that despite all my efforts to get her to see what she was doing, she just couldn't do it.

It would be a good exercise to consider to what degree you fit this profile. How rule-bound are you?

I will be sharing more about this topic in the future, as I learn more. For now, though, it's good to know that to whatever degree you were trained to be "good" and to follow the rules, there is hope! Keep listening to those Holosync soundtracks! They will create positive change in you.

William Harris
Director
Centerpointe Research Institute

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