I quoted from this piece earlier in the day. Is is a long post, but it seems to touch on a number of issues that have recently come up for discussion.
The following material is referencing a book titled Paradox In Group Dynamics, written by Kenwyn K Smith and David N. Berg. It is a difficult book to understand, but we have tried to pull out of it some important points dealing with relationships, particularly relationships involving groups of people. The thing to remember is that a group can be as small as just two people and that many of the subjects talked about can be applied to a group made up of just you and one other person. Paradoxes are puzzles that cannot be solved. They are usually the product of people with a lot of time on their hands. A paradox is usually made up of two opposing statements, which separated make sense, but when put together make no sense at all. A simple example of a paradox follows.
The statement written below is true!
The statement written above is false!
It is easy to see in this example that there is no answer to the puzzle of which statement is right, but there are more complicated paradoxes that are not as easy to see through to realize there is no answers to those puzzles. In real life there are no paradoxes, but there are numerous situations that are so puzzling that the word, paradoxical, is probably the best word to describe them. Often these double-bind situations are the ones that bring forth the phrases: Being caught between a rock and a hard place, Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, or Out of the frying pan and into the fire. They create a type of problem that is often described as a ‘vicious cycle’ because a person finds himself or herself confused and mentally going round and round, not able to make a choice or a decision. The phrases – ‘just spinning my wheels’ or ‘being stuck in a rut’ can also be used to describe this frustrating state o f mind.
The word, Or, is used too often to hide some of these situations. For example the statement: you either trust someone Or you don’t - simply is not true. There is a stage of childhood, where in order to make sense of a complicated world, children have to simplify things to see things and think about them, this mental process is called ‘splitting’ or ‘polarizing’ by psychologists. Either Black Or White, Us Or Them, Darkness Or Light, Good Or Bad, Nice Or Mean etc. are examples of this relatively immature way of looking at the world, separating things that are not really separate, but two extremes of the same thing, like the two ends of a yardstick. Disclosing/Hiding, Rejection/Acceptance, Trust/Mistrust, Progress/Regression,
Courage/Cowardice, Me/We, Bound/Free, Dependent/Independent,
Authorizing/Rebelling are a few examples of splitting or polarizing complicated concepts involving relationships.
To know oneself, one may reflect on one's inner experience, but one also needs to know how one is seen by others. This external knowledge can be obtained only through the feedback provided by others. The reactions of others will not be very valuable unless they are in response to parts of ourselves that we care about, and these can be known to others only if we are willing to disclose them. If one never takes any meaningful actions but remains at a level of trivial conversation, the quality of what is reflected back will be at the same level. In addition, feedback from others is self-disclosure on their part. If one is in a group where members will not disclose either their inner responses or their reactions to what others do, think, and feel, then personal and collective learning will be severely limited. Disclosure and feedback are the necessary conditions for the development of interpersonal relationships.
The question that we each must face is what to disclose about ourselves when we are eager to gain acceptance and what we keep hidden. The most natural thing to do is to reveal only those things that we are sure will be accepted and keep private what we anticipate others will reject. Yet this sets in place the inner sense that, when others do accept us, it is all a sham they are not in a position to reject the "real me" because I have kept it hidden. If others were to know "what I am really like," if I let them see the ugly parts of me that are unacceptable even to me (which is, after all, why I keep them locked away inside), then they would reject me. Thus, the acceptance I gain is unacceptable to me, because it is not based on the parts of me that I "know" are unacceptable. I set myself up to believe those who are accepting me as being unacceptable, paradoxically rejecting the very source from which I crave acceptance when I am given the acceptance I seek. Of course, were I able to accept myself, with all my flaws, acceptance by others would be less important to me, and hence I would be less prone to reject the acceptance that I’m offered.
In this vicious cycle, it can be seen that acceptance and rejection are integrally linked. For our discussion here, the key issue is what happens when the place from which acceptance is being sought is a group made up of individuals all engaging in processes such as the above. The answer is that all find themselves rejecting the group that accepts them, creating a feeling about the group as a whole that it is like quicksand. It is only when the group breaks out of this trap by itself by rejecting the members who are treating it this way that individuals begin to feel that the acceptance is at all authentic. The expression of the group's rejecting side paradoxically enables individuals to feel more secure about letting their rejectable sides be known, which in turn sets up the possibility that the rejectable can be tolerated by the group, making the acceptance that is offered feel more real. Of particular interest to us are those things known to self that one might wish to keep hidden. The desire to hide is often stirred by the fear of being rejected by others. The fear that others will be rejecting may emerge from the parts of self that are rejecting. Fearing our own rejecting sides, we suspect that this is a potent feature of others, and so we work hard to gain assurances that others will not reject as a precondition for our own disclosure. No matter what assurances are given, the proof remains uncertain until the disclosure is attempted.
Once group members start to engage in the dynamics found in the paradoxical disclosure, they encounter those of trust. Group life is filled with dilemmas in which one needs to trust others but the development of trust depends on trust already existing. Before we are willing to trust others, we want to know how they will respond to us, not just at the level of acceptance or rejection but with respect to our weak parts as well as our strong ones, our fears as well as our hopes, our ugliness as well as our beauty. In order to discover how others will respond, someone in a group must be willing to expose his or her weak, fearful, and ugly sides. The willingness to do this depends on the trust in the group.
Paradoxical trust may be symbolized by the puzzle of a cycle that depends upon itself to get started. The problem of developing trust has often been represented by the prisoner's dilemma "game." In this "game," the sentences oftwo isolated prisoners depend on their respective stories about a crime that they allegedly committed. Most versions of the game have the following flavor: If neither prisoner implicates the other, both are set free. If both prisoners blame each other, they both receive long prison terms. If both accept some responsibility for the crime, they receive moderate sentences. If one prisoner accepts some responsibility for the crime and the other blames the first, the first receives a long prison term and the second goes free! The "game" is created because neither prisoner knows the rules at the outset but each gets repeated opportunities to "tell a story" and is told the consequences after each story; that is, the length of the prison term. The paradoxical nature of this game lies in how it begins. The prisoners begin with a two-pronged struggle over trust-trust in the jailor, who is inherently untrustworthy from the prisoners' perspective, and trust in the fellow prisoner. The concern over the other prisoner is whether she or he will opt for self-interest over their joint interests. This is an issue for each inmate, because the structure of the situation requires each to consider the option of looking after self at the expense of the other. The concern about the jailor is focused on whether she or he will.(1) abide by the rules of the game, (2) not alter the rules in response to prisoners' choices, and (3) accurately and reliably transmit information about the choices of the other prisoner. Trusting that this will occur, the prisoner acts and in turn finds out whether that trust was founded. Of course, the smart prisoner makes an initial test of the waters, not risking too much until there is confirmation that the trust being expressed will be honored. One can imagine an exchange between a prisoner and a jailor that goes as follows: "I want you to do such and such!" "Why should I?" "Because it will be good for you." "Y’all mean good for you, don't you?" "Well, of course, it will be good for me, that goes without saying. But it will be good for you, too!" "How can I be sure of that?" "You can't! The only way to find out will be by doing it!" The power of the prisoner-jailor example is that, in a state of distrust, the way to gain the necessary knowledge to make trust possible is by trusting.
When individuals join a group that is either formed or is forming, they are approaching experiences that are unfamiliar. They attempt to create some structure for thinking and acting that will enable them to manage the joining process. The available structures that an individual can draw upon come from his, or her personal history. Each person will bring into this new joining process an approach (or set of approaches) from past encounters and will use this as a guide for managing the unfamiliarity of the new group. At a surface level, the ease with which this joining takes place will depend in large part on how similar the present situation is to past experiences and how accurately the individual decides what overlaps with the past and what is new. If the overlap is small but the individual fails to recognize this, then a great deal is being transferred into this new encounter from past experiences. It might be said that they are bring too much baggage with them. If the overlap is large, the baggage is less evident.
Consider, for example, a person going to a country that he or she has never been to before. He or she takes along the map that previous explorers created and refined across numerous visits. Most of the sites encountered appear on the map, and this is a comfort. Only when the traveler runs into things that are not on the map is it suddenly clear how much he or she depends on what has been on the old map from the past to deal with a strange, new place. In addition, the discovery that the map is not perfect serves as a reason for the traveler to pay more attention to what is in front of him or her at the moment. Had the map been a very bad one and this had been found out earlier, he or she might have noticed more during the trip, because it was necessary to pay attention to keep from getting lost.
A similar process is at work, in group experiences. Whatever the case, be the overlap small or large, a transference is occurring that can be seen as treating the present as though it were the past, so that members can move quickly through the uncertainty of the present toward a more certain future. This transfer process involves an individual's return to an older type of operating in order to deal with the present, a dynamic called Regression. Paradoxically, individuals eager to do something new, or Progress, need to be able to engage in this regression in order to separate which experiences are merely history, from those which are happening in the here and now.
The dynamics involved with the themes of disclosure, trust, and regression deal with a side of life that is hidden. These interconnected paradoxicals come into play when individuals can’t make up their minds about how much and in what forms to interact with others or a group as a whole. At the same time, the group is sorting out for itself how to manage the various ways members engage with it or remain detached from it. To engage others in a group, members must explore what they hide from others and maybe even themselves, as well as what is kept hidden from them. This means that the process of interaction is operating on many different levels that lie beneath the surface of what is seen in the behaviors of groups and their members in their mutual attempts to connect.
These paradoxicals suggest that when certain aspects of shared life are actively engaged in, other parts of life are put into a hidden arena, where the process of interaction continues in a manner not readily seen by those involved. The polarities of acceptance or rejection, trust or mistrust, and progression or regression are not as separate and unconnected as they are often experienced. By allowing these polarities to coexist, members and groups paradoxically can progress while regressing, create acceptance out of rejection, and develop trustworthiness in the midst of mistrust.
There can be no group unless people belong to it. What does belonging to a group mean? The paradoxicals that follow all involve the issue of membership. What are the conflicting and often contradictory emotions aroused by the fact of belonging? For individuals and for the group as a whole, the joining process is a continuous one. \What must the individual give up in order to belong, and does this change as the group changes? How does a group come to determine what individuals can and cannot bring into the group except through the "in-puts" of its members?
What does it mean to be "in"?
Paradoxical identity is the link between individual identity and group identity. Which one comes first? Which one determines the other? Which gives way before the other? Which must be settled and stable before the other can be known? These questions seek to break apart the confusing circularity of the paradoxical identity. Belonging calls for exploring the relationship between involvement and detachment, observation and experience. Are these separate and distinct aspects of belonging to a group? Can there be involvement without withdrawal, or do the two come from a common source of what it means to belong?
The existence of group requires connections among its members. There is nothing to belong to if no such connections exist. The connections are founded on similarities, if the group is founded only similarities, then what becomes of the individual’s talents? The group cannot come into existence as a psychologically meaningful unit unless individuals are able to express their individuality, their differences, so that connections can be found. Again, the vicious circle is both apparent and unsettling, and again we search for that which links the individual and the group.
Paradoxical boundaries leave us where we began. The fundamental question of belonging is the question of,” belonging to what?”. How do we know what the group is? A group must exist before the question of membership can be considered. Boundaries define, what the group is, and yet they also define what it is not. They simultaneously give meaning to belonging and to not belonging, Paradoxically, the boundary around the group enables, even forces group members to confront the emotions around both belonging and not - with what they are going to have to give up in order to belong. Norms are informal ground rules that provide guidelines, concerning appropriate and inappropriate behavior in a group. They are implicitly understood by members and are the foundation beneath behavior in and of the group. In many ways, the "character" of a group can be seen in its norms. If the norms are very loose and easily adjusted from one situation to the next, the group may have a somewhat ‘free’ identity. If they are very strict, the group may be seen as "uptight."
When there is conflict between how an individual wishes to act and how the norms prescribe that he or she "should" behave, the pressure is invariably on the individual to change and adapt to the group. "If you want the benefits of belonging to this group, you had better learn how to fit in." Group members are rarely able to say to the deviating individual, "we are grateful for your deviance, because it helps to loosen up our norms, makes tolerable a wider array of behaviors, and in the long run will make us a better group, because we will be much better able to adapt to our world." The group's response to deviance is usually to keep it in check, use it as an indicator of what is not acceptable, or reject the individual(s) expressing the deviant side of the group. Since the deviance seems counter to the group's norms, the group is unable to see that its very norms created the deviancy. The deviancy is informing the group about aspects of its nature of which it would prefer to remain ignorant. If the group sees the deviancy not as an expression of itself but instead as a characteristic of the individual who is expressing it, norms can’t change to grow with members as they mature.
These heroic actions of resisting group norms often dominate our conceptions of the development of individuality in a group and contribute significantly to members' holding back until they have determined whether the group is to be supported or fought. This withholding, in turn, creates the very kind of group that leads members to take either a heroic or an antiheroic posture when confronted with the fear of a repressive group or a dangerous renegade.
The paradoxical perspective emphasizes that the group exists, grows, and becomes strong and resourceful only if the individuality of its members can be expressed. Both the differences that come as expressions of individuality and the similarities, expressed as connectedness, simultaneously jeopardize and strengthen the group. In like manner, the similarities and the differences both support and threaten the individuality of group members. The expression of differences risks individual disconnection and collective disintegration while providing the possibility of connection based on personally meaningful commonalities. Similarly, the connections risk the stagnancy of conformity and the rebellious exit of individual members. The paradoxical struggle is again within the individual and within the group, to live with the tensions that emanate from the group's dependency on the individuality of its member and the individual's dependency on the common cause of the group.
The concept of boundaries has been important in social science theories for a long time, at the group level, in general systems theory and, at the individual level, in the object- relations work of the psychoanalytical school and the cognitive theories of Piaget. In each tradition, Maturing is understood in boundary-drawing terms (for example, learning to distinguish between breast and self, me and not me, and so on). Once boundaries have been drawn, the possibility of relationship emerges. Without boundary, there can be no relationship. For example, only as the infant builds a sense of a self that is distinct from mother can it develop a relationship with mother. 'Without boundaries, there is fusion. In this regard, boundaries are at the base of everything in life. For a group to have a sense of itself as an entity capable of acting as a whole, it must have clear external boundaries. For the group to develop an internal sense of itself, it must be able to see multiple possibilities for the arrangement of its internal parts. This requires the drawing of distinctions between the parts.
One cannot talk about groups without implicitly invoking the concept of boundaries. There are boundaries in groups that explicitly indicate who belongs and who does not. The importance of boundaries is most visible in the experiences of those who have not been given adequate boundaries. Experiencing the constraints of boundaries gives one the chance to work out how one is going to deal with them. This is evident in the experiences of those who expect to be rejected or held accountable but are not. In a junior high youth club, every adult leader knows that kids expend a great deal of energy testing limits (boundaries). Ganging up and behaving "counterproductively" are often so much fun for this age group, especially since they feel constrained in how much of this they can do at school or at home. In a way, the youth club is a forum where steam can be let off. If, however, the leadership refuses to define and hold clear boundaries for the group, it takes away a lot of the fun for the kids; more important, it deprives them of the necessary lessons that can be learned only by encountering the limits and then dealing with them. For this reason, the testing of the authority figure does not necessarily mean that the kids want the authority to change his or her behavior; rather, it may mean that they want the experience of testing the authority figure. This cannot be done if the boundaries are inadequately drawn or if they "give" each time a kid bangs in to them. Even boundaries that may seem cruel are more helpful developmentally than those not drawn.
One of the most critical functions that a group's boundaries provide is being a type of container for the anxieties carried by individual members as a consequence of their group membership. If members are constantly put in the position of having to bear alone the anxiety of group membership, then the group will always be an overwhelming place. It is in the group', interest to provide a way for its members to deal with the reactions that the group generates in them
Paradoxical boundaries simultaneously make it possible for a group to take actions and at the same time, limit those actions by what the boundaries define. For example, when a group's boundaries are drawn such that it is defined as management, the fulfilling of the management function becomes possible but the option of being labor is taken away. This paradox of simultaneous possibility and limitation is most evident in the boundary delineation associated with labeling. In human consciousness, the only way for us to think is via the symbols that we use to influence changes the group, how much change do we want how much can we tolerate, and how much do we want to feel responsible for? Ultimately, one of the ways influence is attempted and realized in groups is through members speaking or not speaking to each other. Speaking or not speaking, being or not being, and acting or not acting are all forms of influence in a group and may become sources of conflicting and often contradictory reactions for individuals and the group as a whole, depending on how the associated messages are bounded.
When the direction of the group is at stake, the relationship between opposing forces gets lost in the process of choosing between them. Sometimes it is the group that seems to stand in opposition to one or more of its members. At other times, two internal subgroups for example, the powerful and the powerless seem to stand in opposition to each other. In either case, the meaning contained in the relationship between the opposites is obscured, and the "whole," the group, is crippled by its inability to attend to the connections as well as the distinctions.
One of the most critical developmental processes of a group is the creation of an authority system. Usually authority is thought of as something that flows down from above: a boss derives authority from those higher - up. The authority invested in a person can be understood as the outcome of an authorizing process. If we focus on the dynamics of authorizing rather than on the authority itself, it is clear that authority is something that is built or created. It flows from many places to many people.
Professors derive authority from the university, and students accept this as part of obtaining a degree; the judge in a courtroom derives authority from the relevant branch of government, and those who participate in the judicial process accept this because of the socially authorized sanctioned powers of the court.
In a group, members can authorize an individual to enact certain things on their behalf. The members' willingness to accept the activities undertaken by the authorized individual as an expression of the parts of themselves that they have given over actively creates authority in the group. The acceptance makes it possible for those with authority to be effective in representing group members' collective interests. The process of authorizing creates the conditions in which individual contributions can have an influence on the work of the group and the group can be influential in the larger system to which it belongs. In this regard, authority is closely linked to empowerment. One develops power as one empowers others. Taking the power that is available and using it often creates a vacuum, because it is experienced as depriving others of a scarce commodity. As a result, power taking is resisted. Individuals often refuse to accept or exercise the power that is available to them in a group simply to avoid the accusation of having stolen it from someone else or having gained it at others' expense. Paradoxical authority starts with the link between authorizing others and authorizing oneself and explores the paradoxical nature of resistance to authority, one's own and that of other group members. It is through a mutual authorization process that groups have the potential to be greater than the sum of their parts, and the management of resistance is a key to this process. Resistance or rebellion is also authority and acceptance involves resistance. The link between these two "opposite" phenomena is the heart of the paradoxical authority. Yet the very avoidance of taking and using the available power makes individuals in a group, and ultimately the group as a whole, feel powerless. The feelings of powerlessness create an even greater wish for power, making it even harder for anyone to seize it, because the feeling of deprivation is correspondingly larger, and the resistance grows. On the other hand, if one takes the available power and uses it to empower others, then total amount of group and individual power increases.
In the human life cycle, growth involves the development of a good measure of independence. However, in most ways: our strivings for independence are closely linked to the development of new dependencies. We vigorously attempt to break away from our families of origin, so that we can create families of our own. In the severing and transformation of one set of dependencies, we become free to create new dependencies, upon spouses, upon our own children, upon networks created or chosen by us. Paradoxically, the work of becoming independent actually involves giving expression to many of our dependencies. In groups, we observe behavior that, on the surface, can be described as dependent, counterdependent, or independent. Although these concepts are usually defined as nonoverlapping, there are strong connections among them. If, for example, we are dealing with dependency, the other two forms (counterdependence and independence) may well be active at the same time. While a group member's refusal to accept guidance from a leader may express some degree of independence, it may at the same time be a counterdependent denial of the leader's authority, a denial that unwittingly gives that authority more power than would be the case if some degree of dependency were acknowledged. In many ways, the counterdependent individual is as much imprisoned by the dynamics of dependency as someone who accepts the leader's guidance without question.
It is clear that a group can function only if members are able to depend on each other. It is ultimately the mutual dependency that makes the group a group. To deny this dependency or to try to make it into something other than what it is retards the group's capacity to come together as a whole. The metaphor for paradoxical dependency is ecological. For any part of a system to be able to act independently, it must accept its dependency on the other parts with which it together makes up a whole. If we examine group behavior, it is very noticeable that the times when a member seems most troubled by feelings of dependency are when those who are being depended on are asked to be something that they are not or when they are perceived as untrustworthy. In both cases, the desire of the individual member to be independent is very strong. If one is independent, it is much less important to trust others, or so it seems. The dilemma is that the condition of extreme independence creates its own vulnerability. What happens when the "independent" person needs something that can be obtained only from a group? Then the independence sought after and created to compensate for the "untrustworthiness" of the world of others makes the individual's need for trust even greater than it would have been had independence not been so strongly pursued in the first place.
Paradoxical Courage and Cowardice are two extremes of the willingness (or not) to risk loss or pain by action. All growth involves risks. Without taking the risk of falling, a baby could never learn to walk. The problem is that there are no actions that are courageous in themselves. The very same actions could be motivated by courage, could also be motivated by stupidity, impulsiveness, self - destructive tendencies or cowardice itself. How many heroes have faced one fear to do something courageous, simply because they did not want to face a greater fear, perhaps even the fear of being called a coward? The process of taking risks involves identifying all that that could be lost and weighing that against all that that could be gained. How can be an action be called courageous if the individual did not think of all that was at stake, everything that could be lost and chose to take the risk anyway. By the same standard, is it fair to label a person a coward simply because by his or her estimation the reward was not worth the risk. Often, it is simply smart not to take unnecessary risks to earn little or no reward.
The following material is referencing a book titled Paradox In Group Dynamics, written by Kenwyn K Smith and David N. Berg. It is a difficult book to understand, but we have tried to pull out of it some important points dealing with relationships, particularly relationships involving groups of people. The thing to remember is that a group can be as small as just two people and that many of the subjects talked about can be applied to a group made up of just you and one other person. Paradoxes are puzzles that cannot be solved. They are usually the product of people with a lot of time on their hands. A paradox is usually made up of two opposing statements, which separated make sense, but when put together make no sense at all. A simple example of a paradox follows.
The statement written below is true!
The statement written above is false!
It is easy to see in this example that there is no answer to the puzzle of which statement is right, but there are more complicated paradoxes that are not as easy to see through to realize there is no answers to those puzzles. In real life there are no paradoxes, but there are numerous situations that are so puzzling that the word, paradoxical, is probably the best word to describe them. Often these double-bind situations are the ones that bring forth the phrases: Being caught between a rock and a hard place, Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, or Out of the frying pan and into the fire. They create a type of problem that is often described as a ‘vicious cycle’ because a person finds himself or herself confused and mentally going round and round, not able to make a choice or a decision. The phrases – ‘just spinning my wheels’ or ‘being stuck in a rut’ can also be used to describe this frustrating state o f mind.
The word, Or, is used too often to hide some of these situations. For example the statement: you either trust someone Or you don’t - simply is not true. There is a stage of childhood, where in order to make sense of a complicated world, children have to simplify things to see things and think about them, this mental process is called ‘splitting’ or ‘polarizing’ by psychologists. Either Black Or White, Us Or Them, Darkness Or Light, Good Or Bad, Nice Or Mean etc. are examples of this relatively immature way of looking at the world, separating things that are not really separate, but two extremes of the same thing, like the two ends of a yardstick. Disclosing/Hiding, Rejection/Acceptance, Trust/Mistrust, Progress/Regression,
Courage/Cowardice, Me/We, Bound/Free, Dependent/Independent,
Authorizing/Rebelling are a few examples of splitting or polarizing complicated concepts involving relationships.
To know oneself, one may reflect on one's inner experience, but one also needs to know how one is seen by others. This external knowledge can be obtained only through the feedback provided by others. The reactions of others will not be very valuable unless they are in response to parts of ourselves that we care about, and these can be known to others only if we are willing to disclose them. If one never takes any meaningful actions but remains at a level of trivial conversation, the quality of what is reflected back will be at the same level. In addition, feedback from others is self-disclosure on their part. If one is in a group where members will not disclose either their inner responses or their reactions to what others do, think, and feel, then personal and collective learning will be severely limited. Disclosure and feedback are the necessary conditions for the development of interpersonal relationships.
The question that we each must face is what to disclose about ourselves when we are eager to gain acceptance and what we keep hidden. The most natural thing to do is to reveal only those things that we are sure will be accepted and keep private what we anticipate others will reject. Yet this sets in place the inner sense that, when others do accept us, it is all a sham they are not in a position to reject the "real me" because I have kept it hidden. If others were to know "what I am really like," if I let them see the ugly parts of me that are unacceptable even to me (which is, after all, why I keep them locked away inside), then they would reject me. Thus, the acceptance I gain is unacceptable to me, because it is not based on the parts of me that I "know" are unacceptable. I set myself up to believe those who are accepting me as being unacceptable, paradoxically rejecting the very source from which I crave acceptance when I am given the acceptance I seek. Of course, were I able to accept myself, with all my flaws, acceptance by others would be less important to me, and hence I would be less prone to reject the acceptance that I’m offered.
In this vicious cycle, it can be seen that acceptance and rejection are integrally linked. For our discussion here, the key issue is what happens when the place from which acceptance is being sought is a group made up of individuals all engaging in processes such as the above. The answer is that all find themselves rejecting the group that accepts them, creating a feeling about the group as a whole that it is like quicksand. It is only when the group breaks out of this trap by itself by rejecting the members who are treating it this way that individuals begin to feel that the acceptance is at all authentic. The expression of the group's rejecting side paradoxically enables individuals to feel more secure about letting their rejectable sides be known, which in turn sets up the possibility that the rejectable can be tolerated by the group, making the acceptance that is offered feel more real. Of particular interest to us are those things known to self that one might wish to keep hidden. The desire to hide is often stirred by the fear of being rejected by others. The fear that others will be rejecting may emerge from the parts of self that are rejecting. Fearing our own rejecting sides, we suspect that this is a potent feature of others, and so we work hard to gain assurances that others will not reject as a precondition for our own disclosure. No matter what assurances are given, the proof remains uncertain until the disclosure is attempted.
Once group members start to engage in the dynamics found in the paradoxical disclosure, they encounter those of trust. Group life is filled with dilemmas in which one needs to trust others but the development of trust depends on trust already existing. Before we are willing to trust others, we want to know how they will respond to us, not just at the level of acceptance or rejection but with respect to our weak parts as well as our strong ones, our fears as well as our hopes, our ugliness as well as our beauty. In order to discover how others will respond, someone in a group must be willing to expose his or her weak, fearful, and ugly sides. The willingness to do this depends on the trust in the group.
Paradoxical trust may be symbolized by the puzzle of a cycle that depends upon itself to get started. The problem of developing trust has often been represented by the prisoner's dilemma "game." In this "game," the sentences oftwo isolated prisoners depend on their respective stories about a crime that they allegedly committed. Most versions of the game have the following flavor: If neither prisoner implicates the other, both are set free. If both prisoners blame each other, they both receive long prison terms. If both accept some responsibility for the crime, they receive moderate sentences. If one prisoner accepts some responsibility for the crime and the other blames the first, the first receives a long prison term and the second goes free! The "game" is created because neither prisoner knows the rules at the outset but each gets repeated opportunities to "tell a story" and is told the consequences after each story; that is, the length of the prison term. The paradoxical nature of this game lies in how it begins. The prisoners begin with a two-pronged struggle over trust-trust in the jailor, who is inherently untrustworthy from the prisoners' perspective, and trust in the fellow prisoner. The concern over the other prisoner is whether she or he will opt for self-interest over their joint interests. This is an issue for each inmate, because the structure of the situation requires each to consider the option of looking after self at the expense of the other. The concern about the jailor is focused on whether she or he will.(1) abide by the rules of the game, (2) not alter the rules in response to prisoners' choices, and (3) accurately and reliably transmit information about the choices of the other prisoner. Trusting that this will occur, the prisoner acts and in turn finds out whether that trust was founded. Of course, the smart prisoner makes an initial test of the waters, not risking too much until there is confirmation that the trust being expressed will be honored. One can imagine an exchange between a prisoner and a jailor that goes as follows: "I want you to do such and such!" "Why should I?" "Because it will be good for you." "Y’all mean good for you, don't you?" "Well, of course, it will be good for me, that goes without saying. But it will be good for you, too!" "How can I be sure of that?" "You can't! The only way to find out will be by doing it!" The power of the prisoner-jailor example is that, in a state of distrust, the way to gain the necessary knowledge to make trust possible is by trusting.
When individuals join a group that is either formed or is forming, they are approaching experiences that are unfamiliar. They attempt to create some structure for thinking and acting that will enable them to manage the joining process. The available structures that an individual can draw upon come from his, or her personal history. Each person will bring into this new joining process an approach (or set of approaches) from past encounters and will use this as a guide for managing the unfamiliarity of the new group. At a surface level, the ease with which this joining takes place will depend in large part on how similar the present situation is to past experiences and how accurately the individual decides what overlaps with the past and what is new. If the overlap is small but the individual fails to recognize this, then a great deal is being transferred into this new encounter from past experiences. It might be said that they are bring too much baggage with them. If the overlap is large, the baggage is less evident.
Consider, for example, a person going to a country that he or she has never been to before. He or she takes along the map that previous explorers created and refined across numerous visits. Most of the sites encountered appear on the map, and this is a comfort. Only when the traveler runs into things that are not on the map is it suddenly clear how much he or she depends on what has been on the old map from the past to deal with a strange, new place. In addition, the discovery that the map is not perfect serves as a reason for the traveler to pay more attention to what is in front of him or her at the moment. Had the map been a very bad one and this had been found out earlier, he or she might have noticed more during the trip, because it was necessary to pay attention to keep from getting lost.
A similar process is at work, in group experiences. Whatever the case, be the overlap small or large, a transference is occurring that can be seen as treating the present as though it were the past, so that members can move quickly through the uncertainty of the present toward a more certain future. This transfer process involves an individual's return to an older type of operating in order to deal with the present, a dynamic called Regression. Paradoxically, individuals eager to do something new, or Progress, need to be able to engage in this regression in order to separate which experiences are merely history, from those which are happening in the here and now.
The dynamics involved with the themes of disclosure, trust, and regression deal with a side of life that is hidden. These interconnected paradoxicals come into play when individuals can’t make up their minds about how much and in what forms to interact with others or a group as a whole. At the same time, the group is sorting out for itself how to manage the various ways members engage with it or remain detached from it. To engage others in a group, members must explore what they hide from others and maybe even themselves, as well as what is kept hidden from them. This means that the process of interaction is operating on many different levels that lie beneath the surface of what is seen in the behaviors of groups and their members in their mutual attempts to connect.
These paradoxicals suggest that when certain aspects of shared life are actively engaged in, other parts of life are put into a hidden arena, where the process of interaction continues in a manner not readily seen by those involved. The polarities of acceptance or rejection, trust or mistrust, and progression or regression are not as separate and unconnected as they are often experienced. By allowing these polarities to coexist, members and groups paradoxically can progress while regressing, create acceptance out of rejection, and develop trustworthiness in the midst of mistrust.
There can be no group unless people belong to it. What does belonging to a group mean? The paradoxicals that follow all involve the issue of membership. What are the conflicting and often contradictory emotions aroused by the fact of belonging? For individuals and for the group as a whole, the joining process is a continuous one. \What must the individual give up in order to belong, and does this change as the group changes? How does a group come to determine what individuals can and cannot bring into the group except through the "in-puts" of its members?
What does it mean to be "in"?
Paradoxical identity is the link between individual identity and group identity. Which one comes first? Which one determines the other? Which gives way before the other? Which must be settled and stable before the other can be known? These questions seek to break apart the confusing circularity of the paradoxical identity. Belonging calls for exploring the relationship between involvement and detachment, observation and experience. Are these separate and distinct aspects of belonging to a group? Can there be involvement without withdrawal, or do the two come from a common source of what it means to belong?
The existence of group requires connections among its members. There is nothing to belong to if no such connections exist. The connections are founded on similarities, if the group is founded only similarities, then what becomes of the individual’s talents? The group cannot come into existence as a psychologically meaningful unit unless individuals are able to express their individuality, their differences, so that connections can be found. Again, the vicious circle is both apparent and unsettling, and again we search for that which links the individual and the group.
Paradoxical boundaries leave us where we began. The fundamental question of belonging is the question of,” belonging to what?”. How do we know what the group is? A group must exist before the question of membership can be considered. Boundaries define, what the group is, and yet they also define what it is not. They simultaneously give meaning to belonging and to not belonging, Paradoxically, the boundary around the group enables, even forces group members to confront the emotions around both belonging and not - with what they are going to have to give up in order to belong. Norms are informal ground rules that provide guidelines, concerning appropriate and inappropriate behavior in a group. They are implicitly understood by members and are the foundation beneath behavior in and of the group. In many ways, the "character" of a group can be seen in its norms. If the norms are very loose and easily adjusted from one situation to the next, the group may have a somewhat ‘free’ identity. If they are very strict, the group may be seen as "uptight."
When there is conflict between how an individual wishes to act and how the norms prescribe that he or she "should" behave, the pressure is invariably on the individual to change and adapt to the group. "If you want the benefits of belonging to this group, you had better learn how to fit in." Group members are rarely able to say to the deviating individual, "we are grateful for your deviance, because it helps to loosen up our norms, makes tolerable a wider array of behaviors, and in the long run will make us a better group, because we will be much better able to adapt to our world." The group's response to deviance is usually to keep it in check, use it as an indicator of what is not acceptable, or reject the individual(s) expressing the deviant side of the group. Since the deviance seems counter to the group's norms, the group is unable to see that its very norms created the deviancy. The deviancy is informing the group about aspects of its nature of which it would prefer to remain ignorant. If the group sees the deviancy not as an expression of itself but instead as a characteristic of the individual who is expressing it, norms can’t change to grow with members as they mature.
These heroic actions of resisting group norms often dominate our conceptions of the development of individuality in a group and contribute significantly to members' holding back until they have determined whether the group is to be supported or fought. This withholding, in turn, creates the very kind of group that leads members to take either a heroic or an antiheroic posture when confronted with the fear of a repressive group or a dangerous renegade.
The paradoxical perspective emphasizes that the group exists, grows, and becomes strong and resourceful only if the individuality of its members can be expressed. Both the differences that come as expressions of individuality and the similarities, expressed as connectedness, simultaneously jeopardize and strengthen the group. In like manner, the similarities and the differences both support and threaten the individuality of group members. The expression of differences risks individual disconnection and collective disintegration while providing the possibility of connection based on personally meaningful commonalities. Similarly, the connections risk the stagnancy of conformity and the rebellious exit of individual members. The paradoxical struggle is again within the individual and within the group, to live with the tensions that emanate from the group's dependency on the individuality of its member and the individual's dependency on the common cause of the group.
The concept of boundaries has been important in social science theories for a long time, at the group level, in general systems theory and, at the individual level, in the object- relations work of the psychoanalytical school and the cognitive theories of Piaget. In each tradition, Maturing is understood in boundary-drawing terms (for example, learning to distinguish between breast and self, me and not me, and so on). Once boundaries have been drawn, the possibility of relationship emerges. Without boundary, there can be no relationship. For example, only as the infant builds a sense of a self that is distinct from mother can it develop a relationship with mother. 'Without boundaries, there is fusion. In this regard, boundaries are at the base of everything in life. For a group to have a sense of itself as an entity capable of acting as a whole, it must have clear external boundaries. For the group to develop an internal sense of itself, it must be able to see multiple possibilities for the arrangement of its internal parts. This requires the drawing of distinctions between the parts.
One cannot talk about groups without implicitly invoking the concept of boundaries. There are boundaries in groups that explicitly indicate who belongs and who does not. The importance of boundaries is most visible in the experiences of those who have not been given adequate boundaries. Experiencing the constraints of boundaries gives one the chance to work out how one is going to deal with them. This is evident in the experiences of those who expect to be rejected or held accountable but are not. In a junior high youth club, every adult leader knows that kids expend a great deal of energy testing limits (boundaries). Ganging up and behaving "counterproductively" are often so much fun for this age group, especially since they feel constrained in how much of this they can do at school or at home. In a way, the youth club is a forum where steam can be let off. If, however, the leadership refuses to define and hold clear boundaries for the group, it takes away a lot of the fun for the kids; more important, it deprives them of the necessary lessons that can be learned only by encountering the limits and then dealing with them. For this reason, the testing of the authority figure does not necessarily mean that the kids want the authority to change his or her behavior; rather, it may mean that they want the experience of testing the authority figure. This cannot be done if the boundaries are inadequately drawn or if they "give" each time a kid bangs in to them. Even boundaries that may seem cruel are more helpful developmentally than those not drawn.
One of the most critical functions that a group's boundaries provide is being a type of container for the anxieties carried by individual members as a consequence of their group membership. If members are constantly put in the position of having to bear alone the anxiety of group membership, then the group will always be an overwhelming place. It is in the group', interest to provide a way for its members to deal with the reactions that the group generates in them
Paradoxical boundaries simultaneously make it possible for a group to take actions and at the same time, limit those actions by what the boundaries define. For example, when a group's boundaries are drawn such that it is defined as management, the fulfilling of the management function becomes possible but the option of being labor is taken away. This paradox of simultaneous possibility and limitation is most evident in the boundary delineation associated with labeling. In human consciousness, the only way for us to think is via the symbols that we use to influence changes the group, how much change do we want how much can we tolerate, and how much do we want to feel responsible for? Ultimately, one of the ways influence is attempted and realized in groups is through members speaking or not speaking to each other. Speaking or not speaking, being or not being, and acting or not acting are all forms of influence in a group and may become sources of conflicting and often contradictory reactions for individuals and the group as a whole, depending on how the associated messages are bounded.
When the direction of the group is at stake, the relationship between opposing forces gets lost in the process of choosing between them. Sometimes it is the group that seems to stand in opposition to one or more of its members. At other times, two internal subgroups for example, the powerful and the powerless seem to stand in opposition to each other. In either case, the meaning contained in the relationship between the opposites is obscured, and the "whole," the group, is crippled by its inability to attend to the connections as well as the distinctions.
One of the most critical developmental processes of a group is the creation of an authority system. Usually authority is thought of as something that flows down from above: a boss derives authority from those higher - up. The authority invested in a person can be understood as the outcome of an authorizing process. If we focus on the dynamics of authorizing rather than on the authority itself, it is clear that authority is something that is built or created. It flows from many places to many people.
Professors derive authority from the university, and students accept this as part of obtaining a degree; the judge in a courtroom derives authority from the relevant branch of government, and those who participate in the judicial process accept this because of the socially authorized sanctioned powers of the court.
In a group, members can authorize an individual to enact certain things on their behalf. The members' willingness to accept the activities undertaken by the authorized individual as an expression of the parts of themselves that they have given over actively creates authority in the group. The acceptance makes it possible for those with authority to be effective in representing group members' collective interests. The process of authorizing creates the conditions in which individual contributions can have an influence on the work of the group and the group can be influential in the larger system to which it belongs. In this regard, authority is closely linked to empowerment. One develops power as one empowers others. Taking the power that is available and using it often creates a vacuum, because it is experienced as depriving others of a scarce commodity. As a result, power taking is resisted. Individuals often refuse to accept or exercise the power that is available to them in a group simply to avoid the accusation of having stolen it from someone else or having gained it at others' expense. Paradoxical authority starts with the link between authorizing others and authorizing oneself and explores the paradoxical nature of resistance to authority, one's own and that of other group members. It is through a mutual authorization process that groups have the potential to be greater than the sum of their parts, and the management of resistance is a key to this process. Resistance or rebellion is also authority and acceptance involves resistance. The link between these two "opposite" phenomena is the heart of the paradoxical authority. Yet the very avoidance of taking and using the available power makes individuals in a group, and ultimately the group as a whole, feel powerless. The feelings of powerlessness create an even greater wish for power, making it even harder for anyone to seize it, because the feeling of deprivation is correspondingly larger, and the resistance grows. On the other hand, if one takes the available power and uses it to empower others, then total amount of group and individual power increases.
In the human life cycle, growth involves the development of a good measure of independence. However, in most ways: our strivings for independence are closely linked to the development of new dependencies. We vigorously attempt to break away from our families of origin, so that we can create families of our own. In the severing and transformation of one set of dependencies, we become free to create new dependencies, upon spouses, upon our own children, upon networks created or chosen by us. Paradoxically, the work of becoming independent actually involves giving expression to many of our dependencies. In groups, we observe behavior that, on the surface, can be described as dependent, counterdependent, or independent. Although these concepts are usually defined as nonoverlapping, there are strong connections among them. If, for example, we are dealing with dependency, the other two forms (counterdependence and independence) may well be active at the same time. While a group member's refusal to accept guidance from a leader may express some degree of independence, it may at the same time be a counterdependent denial of the leader's authority, a denial that unwittingly gives that authority more power than would be the case if some degree of dependency were acknowledged. In many ways, the counterdependent individual is as much imprisoned by the dynamics of dependency as someone who accepts the leader's guidance without question.
It is clear that a group can function only if members are able to depend on each other. It is ultimately the mutual dependency that makes the group a group. To deny this dependency or to try to make it into something other than what it is retards the group's capacity to come together as a whole. The metaphor for paradoxical dependency is ecological. For any part of a system to be able to act independently, it must accept its dependency on the other parts with which it together makes up a whole. If we examine group behavior, it is very noticeable that the times when a member seems most troubled by feelings of dependency are when those who are being depended on are asked to be something that they are not or when they are perceived as untrustworthy. In both cases, the desire of the individual member to be independent is very strong. If one is independent, it is much less important to trust others, or so it seems. The dilemma is that the condition of extreme independence creates its own vulnerability. What happens when the "independent" person needs something that can be obtained only from a group? Then the independence sought after and created to compensate for the "untrustworthiness" of the world of others makes the individual's need for trust even greater than it would have been had independence not been so strongly pursued in the first place.
Paradoxical Courage and Cowardice are two extremes of the willingness (or not) to risk loss or pain by action. All growth involves risks. Without taking the risk of falling, a baby could never learn to walk. The problem is that there are no actions that are courageous in themselves. The very same actions could be motivated by courage, could also be motivated by stupidity, impulsiveness, self - destructive tendencies or cowardice itself. How many heroes have faced one fear to do something courageous, simply because they did not want to face a greater fear, perhaps even the fear of being called a coward? The process of taking risks involves identifying all that that could be lost and weighing that against all that that could be gained. How can be an action be called courageous if the individual did not think of all that was at stake, everything that could be lost and chose to take the risk anyway. By the same standard, is it fair to label a person a coward simply because by his or her estimation the reward was not worth the risk. Often, it is simply smart not to take unnecessary risks to earn little or no reward.
? thanks in advance
