Don't Be Nice Be Real Read online

  I am grateful to all the people who have been in my trainings and sessions: you have been my life-blood. By allowing me to give to you I experience my purpose for being, an intoxicating energy of healing and wholeness, a renewal of spirit, and a crucible for my own growth.

  Although I have tried to give credit to Marshall Rosenberg throughout the book where it was due, I am sure there are phrases, principles, concepts and maybe even stories that originated with Marshall for which he was not acknowledged. Because I have been studying with him for over 20 years, there is a also bit of blur as to the origin of many ideas expressed in this book.

  Marshall Rosenberg has shared his personal self with me, heart and soul, his genius and experience. He has touched me deeply and I have been transformed. How can I express my gratitude?

  How does a flower thank the sun for the warmth and light that has opened it?

  Chapter

  DON’T PAY THE PRICE OF BEING NICE

  You better not shout, you better not cry, You better be nice, I’m telling you why...

  Have you been a naughty or a nice boy or girl? You have been nice? Well, then you must be enjoying the rewards of being a good little boy or girl. These rewards often include depression, intermittent explosiveness, career confusion or job meaninglessness, ambiguous anxiety, low awareness of one’s own needs, either flat or explosive relationships, resentment about being the victim of “mean people,” subtle self-hate and assorted psychosomatic illnesses.

  What a tragedy that our culture puts us in conflict with our human nature. It took me till the end of the school year in first grade before I could sit for the whole period with my hands folded, my feet together and my mouth shut. Then I was told “What a nice little boy you were today!” That is when I was seduced into the slavery of people pleasing. I prostituted and prevented my little boyness from expressing itself in order to get those few little drops of perverted praise.

  The energy it took to control such a vital force took a noticeable toll on my physical body. One of my mentors, Virginia Satir, noticed it the first time she met me. She put her hand on my uptight shoulder and proclaimed to a large audience of people in La Jolla, California, “Now this man has paid a heavy price for being nice. In order to survive, he has learned to be a people pleaser, and now carries all this tension in his shoulders in order to control his spontaneous expression.” This was powerful news coming from Satir, who is a mythic figure in the social science and mental health fields. She is called the Mother of Family Therapy and is credited with coining the term “people pleaser.” John Bradshaw, best-selling author and creator of the popular Public Broadcasting Service series “Bradshaw on the Family,” and other well known self-help authors, draw heavily on her work. And she was right. Not only had I paid a heavy price, but so had everyone around me.

  So now I am trying to get the word out that being nice has its price. I've already told you some of the “rewards” the nice person receives. Here are just a few of the costs that the nice person's family, friends, and associates pay:

  1. Always being nice prevents people around the nice person from receiving feedback that would stimulate their growth. By “growth” I mean gaining knowledge about, and insight into, oneself and others.

  2. Nice people often react with pain if anyone around them expresses uncomfortable feelings. They get angry, thinking others should have to be nice too. Or they feel hurt and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed?

  3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen.

  4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression.

  5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease.

  Proper Peachy Parents

  In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love.

  -§

  Emotionally

  starving children

  are easier to

  control, well fed

  children don’t

  need to be.

  -§

  I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving:

  Covert War

  by David Wilcox Dear mom and dad here’s why I can’t come home.

  I can talk with either one of you just fine, when it’s either one alone.

  But Thanksgiving table’s goin’ to be pulled out bigger.

  If we talk at all, one of you will pull the trigger.

  I used to run those battle lines try’n to smooth over what got said.

  Try’n to get a medal, try’n to get some shrapnel in my head.

  Thought it was my duty to plead and to implore,

  But I caught too much crossfire in your covert war.

  Television talk fills the air so you don’t have to start.

  You claim your territories in the rooms upstairs,

  To keep yourselves apart.

  Holy days they bring us all together,

  After so much left unsaid.

  You taught us well not to kick under the table.

  Kick under your breath instead.

  I love you and I’d never want to see you bleed

  When comments cut like steel

  So to hold your fire i’d block the shot and

  Take the hit for you as if I could not feel.

  I thought they passed right through me

  And I had no
scars to hide.

  Now I open up and try to love

  And find they’re still inside.

  ‘Cause I used to run those battle lines

  Trying to plead, to implore.

  Please won’t you hold the cease-fire out a little longer

  ‘Till the next uproar.

  I took it all in childhood

  But I can’t take it no more.

  ‘Cause I caught too much crossfire in your covert war.

  There is a huge difference between someone who has true respect, honor, and empathy for the needs of others and someone who is “nice” because they were trained to honor the needs of others and not their own. For the most part, observing the behavior of both of these people one might come up with the same evaluation; that they are polite, cultured and have good manners.

  But the intention, the feeling and the reasons behind these same behaviors are totally different. The “nice” person is operating from conventional morality; what child psychologists Kohlberg and Piaget call Stage Three of Moral Reasoning: “Good boy or nice girl orientation.” This is where “right action” is behavior carried out to please or impress others. The genuinely empathic and considerate person operates from what Kohlberg and Piaget call Postconventional Morality. They tell us that this level is usually reached only after age twenty, and even then, by only a small portion of the adults in our culture. It is called “postconventional” because the moral principles that underlie the conventions of a society are actually understood.

  How important is it to teach children to be considerate of others through their own understanding and from their own autonomous free wills? How important is it that children develop empathy and compassion—and not just learn to be good or nice? Alfie Kohn makes this dramatic point in his great book Punished by Rewards: “Autonomy is not simply one value among many that children should acquire, nor is it simply one technique for helping them grow into good people. In the final analysis, none of the virtues, including generosity and caring, can be successfully promoted in the absence of choice. A jarring reminder of that fact was provided by the following declaration made by a man whose name is (or should be) familiar to most of us: he recalled being taught that the highest duty was to help those in need, but learned this in the context of the importance of “obeying promptly the wishes and commands of my parents, teachers, and priests, and indeed of all adults…. Whatever they said was always right.”

  The man who said this was Rudolf Hess, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz, the German death camp. Prosocial values are important, but if the environment in which they are taught emphasizes obedience (being nice because the teacher will punish you if you aren’t and reward you if you are) rather than autonomy, all may be lost. Jean Piaget, the world’s best-known expert on children’s developmental stages, author of The Moral Judgment of the Child, put it simply “punishment...renders autonomy of conscience impossible.”

  Anyone want to help me start PAPA, Parents for Alternatives to Punishment Association? (There is already a group in England called ‘EPPOCH’ for end physical punishment of children.)

  In Kohn’s other great book Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, he explains how all punishments, even the sneaky, repackaged, “nice” punishments called logical or natural consequences, destroy any respectful, loving relationship between adult and child and impede the process of ethical development. (Need I mention Enron, Martha Stewart, the Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal or certain car repairmen?) Any type of coercion, whether it is the seduction of rewards or the humiliation of punishment, creates a tear in the fabric of relational connection between adults and children. Then adults become simply dispensers of goodies and authoritarian dispensers of controlling punishments. The atmosphere of fear and scarcity grows as the sense of connectedness that fosters true and generous cooperation, giving from the heart, withers. Using punishments and rewards is like drinking salt water. It does create a short-term relief, but long-term it makes matters worse. This desert of emotional connectedness is fertile ground for acting-out to get attention. Punishment is a use of force, in the negative sense of that word, not an expression of true power or strength. David R. Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. author of the book Power v. Force writes “force is the universal substitute for truth. The need to control others stems from lack of power, just as vanity stems from lack of self-esteem. Punishment is a form of violence, an ineffective substitute for power.

  Sadly though parents are afraid not to hit and punish their children for fear they will turn out to be bank robbers. But the truth may well be the opposite. Research shows that virtually all felony offenders were harshly punished as children. Besides children learn thru modeling. Punishment models the tactic of deliberately creating pain for another to get something you want to happen. Punishment does not teach children to care about how their actions might create pain for another, it teaches them it is ok to create pain for another if you have the power to get away with it. Basically might makes right. Punishment gets children to focus on themselves and what is happening to them instead of developing empathy for how their behavior affects another.

  Creating “Correct” Children in the Classroom

  One of the most popular discipline programs in American schools is called Assertive Discipline. It teaches teachers to inflict the old “obey or suffer” method of control on students. Here you disguise the threat of punishment by calling it a choice the child is making. As in, “You have a choice, you can either finish your homework or miss the outing this weekend.” Then when the child chooses to try to protect his dignity against this form of terrorism, by refusing to do his homework, you tell him he has chosen his logical, natural consequence of being excluded from the outing. Putting it this way helps the parent or teacher mitigate against the bad feelings and guilt that would otherwise arise to tell the adult that they are operating outside the principles of compassionate relating. This insidious method is even worse than outand-out punishing, where you can at least rebel against your punisher. The use of this mind game teaches the child the false, crazy-making belief that they wanted something bad or painful to happen to them. These programs also have the stated intention of getting the child to be angry with himself for making a poor choice. In this smoke and mirrors game, the children are “causing” everything to happen and the teachers are the puppets of the children’s choices. The only ones who are not taking responsibility for their actions are the adults.

  Another popular coercive strategy is to use “peer pressure” to create compliance. For instance, a teacher tells her class that if anyone misbehaves then they all won’t get their pizza party. What a great way to turn children against each other.

  All this is done to help (translation: compel) children to behave themselves. But of course they are not behaving themselves: they are being “behaved” by the adults. Well-meaning teachers and parents try to teach children to be motivated (translation: do boring or aversive stuff without questioning why), responsible (translation: thoughtless conformity to the house rules) people. When surveys are conducted in which fourth-graders are asked what being good means, over 90% answer “being quiet.” And when teachers are asked what happens in a successful classroom, the answer is, “the teacher is able to keep the students on task” (translation: in line, doing what they are told). Consulting firms measuring teacher competence consider this a major criterion of teacher effectiveness.

  In other words if the students are quietly doing what they were told the teacher is evaluated as good. However my understanding of ‘real learning’ with twenty to forty children is that it is quite naturally a bit noisy and messy. Otherwise children are just playing a nice game of school, based on indoctrination and little integrated retained education.

  Both punishments and rewards foster a preoccupation with a narrow egocentric self-interest that undermines good values. All little Johnny is thinking about is “How much will you give me if I do X? How can I avoid getting punished if I do Y? What do they wan
t me to do and what happens to me if I don’t do it?” Instead we could teach him to ask, “What kind of person do I want to be and what kind of community do I want to help make?” And Mom is thinking “You didn’t do what I wanted, so now I’m going to make something unpleasant happen to you, for your own good to help you fit into our (dominance/submission based) society.” This contributes to a culture of coercion and prevents a community of compassion. And as we are learning on the global level with our war on terrorism, as you use your energy and resources to punish people you run out of energy and resources to protect people. And even if children look well-behaved, they are not behaving themselves They are being behaved by controlling parents and teachers.

  Dr. Piaget confirmed that true moral development and self-responsibility can only occur where the child is surrounded with moral behavior and allowed to grow her own understanding of the ideals of integrity, interdependence and interconnectedness. He put it this way, “Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressure.”

  But this moral autonomy is not supported in our topsy-turvy school and family systems where respect for authority actually means fear of authority. Where there is fear there cannot be respect. Although a child may envy or fear the power a parent or teacher wields over them, their feelings do not include the sacred, essential quality of loving reverence which makes respect, respect. It is akin to the battered dependent wife saying she loves and respects her abuser, when her daily experience is fear. Jerry Jampolsky, author and founder of the Center for Attitudinal Healing, reminds us that it is fear, not hate, that is love’s opposite.