Dominance, Performative Behavior and Internal Practice
One of the great potentials of finding a new story every week to view through the lens of the partnership model is that the experience constantly allows for rich, new and rediscovered opportunities. New stories constantly emerge that call for a strong, improvisational partnership practice. Meanwhile, past experiences may be remembered that, with partnership thinking can help to understand how the dominance-based, traditional model of work and personal relationships is working. By weighing the pros and cons of both traditional dominance-based interactions and alternative, partnership based interactions that could be utilized, we can make better choices for our health and wellbeing and the health and wellbeing of others—and our organizations.
Some of us might believe or simply feel that we are slaves to our emotions. We may feel compelled to react as our emotions dictate. Reactive behavior may have been behaviorally programmed into us by parents, authorities, or others who may have been our models for the right way to behave. Like any disciplinary regime, the behavioral programming—whether associating a whipping with a certain action or language, or associating shaming and humiliation with a certain behavior or attitude or expression—pairs a certain stimulus with a certain response. When the response is behaviorally programmed, then the stimulus can trigger the response: shame, humiliation, or more complex emotions that may arise due to the presence of unanticipated or unconscious shame or humiliation.
Models such as primary caregivers; attractive, successful, powerful and attention-getting people of status in our human environments; older siblings, bosses and the like can offer very persuasive models for dominance—or partnership-oriented—behavior. If these models utilize harsh discipline and create a morality for how you dress, talk, and behave, then strong dominance-based emotions are likely to have been programmed into us, especially if these people are around us very early in life, or hold enormous power over us.
Cueing, a term that refers in psychological research usually to visual or aural cues or environments, can trigger state-dependent behavior. A simple way to describe this is, if someone speaks to you in a certain tone of voice that for you has been repetitively associated with strong negative memories, then the chance is it will elicit certain responses associated with how you defend yourself from or acquiesce to the accusations and demands (or respond to the nurturing and support) of that tone of voice. Some of us have had a sufficiently supportive and nurturing interpersonal and work environment that cues of this type don’t generally bring up shame, self-blame or humiliation.
In the restaurant and hospitality industry of a destination tourist town where I had the opportunity to nurture and watch closely a range of people, ages, work and social environments and behaviors, you could plainly see with respect to a number of people the mechanisms of dominance at work. For years I worked with, for and had others working for me who I listened to, dialogued with and got to know beyond how they simply behaved while doing their job. Occasionally, customers for instance came into a busy workplace and launched a tirade when their needs were not instantly met on their own terms. It was not unusual, for example, for the teen-age hostess serving the front lines of customer service to bear the brunt of the customer’s performative behavior.
If a person is brought up in an environment that models healthy self esteem as well as maintaining a consistent nurturing environment for healthy self esteem, then often one’s reactions to the surly customer—who may be acting out quite personal attacks—is very different from the one who is raised to fear or subject themselves to dominant personalities. What appears to happen in Freudian terms (my apologies to all those who see no value in Freud) though I have not thoroughly investigated contemporary research to find if notable correlations have been discovered (or the hypothesis disproven), might be described as follows.
A person brought up in a dominance-based environment, where actions beyond necessary morals and ethics are moralized in a strong ought/ought not, should/should not way, is that we seem to internalize and aggregate the voices of authority. The aggregate voice of all the authorities we have submitted to, especially those who have created intense emotional experiences to remember the discipline by, seem to become the voice of the superego, or internal policing voice. This voice—and the emotional experiences it is remembered by—may react in rapidfire fashion to a verbal cue, or even perhaps a body language cue. The reaction results in releasing the feeling of shame or humiliation, though none may actually be warranted, appropriate or even healthy.
The self-blame response follows, perhaps because according to the science, cognitive functions interlaced with emotional functions, particularly the hormonally and neurochemically charged fight-or-flight mode of our brains and bodies, tend to have longer response times. The short of it is if we’ve been behaviorally programmed in a strong dominance-based environment, and the majority of observational modeling has reinforced dominance-based reactions—submission or retaliation, for instance—then we are likely, we are primed, to blame ourselves for the attacks that occur from for instance irate customers.
How often would a teen-age hostess likely stop and think, ‘this person has frustration that needs venting’? Or, ‘its okay for this person to behave the way they are behaving, and I (and my organization) am not necessarily responsible for it’? How often would a teen-age hostess likely stop and think, ‘I am not the person driving the customer’s blame, shaming and emotionally pitched dynamic’?
The problem with rapid firing times for fight-or-flight emotions that have been behaviorally reinforced is that we perceive the emotion and all the validating thoughts and senses that go along with it long before we are able to assess whether the incident we relate those emotions to is actually responsible for part or all of those emotions. In old World War II movies a common scene showed aviators, gunners or concerned citizens in Civil Defense organizations learning to identify enemy airships by their outline. Posters of various outlines of planes would presumably help the vigilant separate friendly from enemy aircraft. It may be worth while to imagine the fight-or-flight emotions responding in a similar way to a perceived circumstance of dominance: shame, blame or coercion. Behavioral programming may have primed us to feel guilty or to feel shame even when we are not responsible, or are limited in what courtesies we can extend.
When was the last time you questioned the validity of especially negative emotional states? When thoughts of self blame (or retaliatory blame of others as a form of ego defense) have arisen, when was the last time any of us questioned these reactions, or had a successful, attractive model for observationally learning such questioning? Instead—and as per a feminine and beneficial way of treating our emotions I would not want to limit—we tend to give supremacy and carte blanche validity to emotional states, even when our primed reactions may lead to fallacies in judgment.
While we can work to dismantle the kneejerk assumption—that if we feel a certain way, the thoughts that rationalize that feeling are necessarily true—a difficult obstacle may exist in the form of a strong dominance-based environment that cues shame, blame and coercion in order to control. Such an environment can be the hallmark of a strong type A personality, someone who themselves have been wounded, or someone who has simply been socialized to treat others that way. If the organizational or social environment is saturated with such dominance-preferring personalities, then the likelihood cues obstructing such thinking and promoting reactivity are all the more stronger.
The work that really needs to be done in investing ourselves socially in the partnership model, whether at work, at home or in social and international relations, is to begin to observe and acknowledge how people are using their power. Are they setting up a nurturing environment ripe for creativity and supportive of the whole? Are they using shame, blame and coercion justifiably, or are these tactics used simply to exercise the utmost control with the utmost power? The goal is not to moralize against those who are using dominance-based behaviors to control the environments around them. Rather, the goal is to simply witness and make conscious.
By setting these behaviors apart and aside we can begin to practice partnership-based alternatives, while showing up fully prepared to acknowledge the dominance-based behaviors that may be our social inheritance. Beginning with our internal dialogue and feelings, we can question where our emotions are leading us to think, and whether those thoughts best serve us and a nurturing, partnership-oriented environment. With that in mind, we may yet, in a strong dominance-based environment, best serve our health and wellbeing by tuning into what works to protect ourselves, and respond accordingly. If we cultivate awareness, we will be able to provide for ourselves a rich, nourishing environment, as well as become acute at identifying the issues with dominance-based environments. We will be able to counterbalance the shock of shaming, blaming, manipulative negativity and hostility with cognitive re-thinking and compassion towards ourselves.
