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Some Thoughts About Spanking

There have been a lot of articles lately about spanking children, some in favor of and others opposed to it. It's occurred to me that my position against spanking in some way empowers those who still justify it as a tool for getting children to behave. Is not a self-righteous position flailed (even silently, non verbally) against spankers itself lacking compassion and abusive, does it not invalidate, strike out at, and hurt the spanker?

Let me explain: It's important for those of us who are against spanking to notice that our position isn't having the effect we say we want. Our position is adversarial. It's similar to one's position about peace. "Peace-niks" in the 60's were every bit as violent as the soldiers in Vietnam. That is to say, any position automatically brings forth an equally powerful opposite position.

I know also that my position against spanking is loaded with self-righteousness; it's culturally and intellectually biased. We "enlightened" ones for human rights are so right that it automatically gives rise to the opposite position. I have had no space for a local parent (one born and raised in Hawaii) to strike out in anger at their child. They are wrong, and I am right that they are wrong, and, for "reasons," they keep on doing it. They argue, violently, "It's my child and it's none of your @#$&* business" (parents use anger to keep teachers from getting to the truth about what's happening at home).

Something about how I/we have been communicating keeps producing more of the same. It's as though spankers have to keep hitting me where it hurts, to make me wrong for my self-righteous position.

No matter how loving I think I may be I have a sense of what it must be like to be a mother in the supermarket on the receiving end of my stink-eye masked as compassion as she verbally and physically abuses her child. I first talked with and eventually reported a neighbor who was hitting his children. Nothing seems to ultimately work. If anything, it looks as though my efforts as a communication consultant these past 33 years has had the opposite effect.

Teachers also are frustrated. They can tell which students are yelled at at home just by looking at their faces. The hurt, the sadness and daily invalidations takes it's toll; the brightness, the inquisitiveness, the beauty, slowly disappears. An "attitude" creeps in. Misbehavior and poor performance draws attention to the fact that there's a communication problem at home. After a few "tries" at getting into communication the teacher resorts to lowering grades. Real low grades replaces the verbal communication-skills necessary to effect a transformation between the child and his/her parent(s).

In my profession we say that spanking is what adults resort to when they've lost their ability to be in communication (verbally) with their child. After the very first spank, family members unconsciously agree upon an imitation of communication within the family thereafter.

Yellers and spankers are unconsciously programmed to not seek out a communication consultant. Why? Because a consultant, in the process of coaching the family in creating a new communication model, would reveal that the child has been merely drawing attention to some out-integrity, some unacknowledged perpetration, conscious or not, within the family. Usually this out-integrity is an addiction. It's something that no family member is even willing to address let alone give up, such as lying, alcohol/drugs, taxes, car insurance, or some deception. Children are integrity meters. They know intuitively when something is wrong. They do what it takes, even get hit, fail in school, or make themselves sick, to resolve it.

My purpose in writing this article is to share these thoughts. I offer no solution. Many of my/our solutions aren't working, other than to upset spankers and make them feel badly, or less-than, which results in more violent yellings, harder swats or more vigorous shakings.

Hitting and yelling is an addiction just like alcohol or marijuana and it's equally difficult to acknowledge and stop. What I have never done is share with the community at large my experience like I'm doing through this article. Have you? I'd like to read other's thoughts and experiences about spanking. For me, it hurts to see a child spanked. I was spanked "from love" with a hairbrush more times than I can count. Only now do I know that my mother and I had absolutely no choice but to communicate with each other that way. My mother never learned how to get into communication with me to find out what I was trying to communicate nor were there any relationship communication consultants back then. Worse yet, I knew it was right to hit a child and that I deserved to be hit because the "nice" relatives, teachers and neighbors stood by and non verbally supported it.

It's clear we haven't had enough conversations about this subject to make the kind of difference we'd like to make. I support you in clipping this letter and giving it to someone, even anonymously.

All the effort and money spent on preventing, eliminating, reducing, or controlling abuse is to no avail until we agree on a definition of what it is. — Spouse Abuse Tutorial — Kerry

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Integrity & Out-Integrity

Integrity:

Whole and complete. Nothing missing, nothing added. Also an experience, as in, an experience of integrity. An experience is outside the mind. The mind may find itself explaining or justifying a broken agreement or why a student is failing. The very preoccupation of the mind with the subject matter is proof that something about the experience is incomplete. The person is not whole and complete, something (the justification) is added. Truth needs no justification.

Out-integrity:

Something you've done that goes against your own code of ethics. It puts your integrity out. You feel badly about it. It conflicts with your personal standards.

For example: For me, eating things that contain refined sugar is out-integrity. Another is, I used to be able to lie to a police officer and swear I wasn't speeding as much as they said I was. Now it wouldn't work for me to do that.

Note: When I was young I had many unacknowledged lies, unacknowledged to myself and to others. I did not know back then what the source of my unhappiness was. I had no idea that there was a connection between lying to a police officer and my experience of integrity. In fact, I had so many small lies going that I had no experience of integrity, I was oblivious to such an experience. Later, as I started to clean up my messes, my perpetrations, I began to experience the effects of even a single (for example: "I'll be with you in a minute.") lie.

An out-integrity can be an incomplete, something that I've been procrastinating. It can also be a thought withheld, such as a criticism, judgment or acknowledgment, a badmouthing of another, not having the integrity to communicate it to the person's face.

Most often, an incomplete is something for which you have not acknowledged responsibility, something that you are blaming someone else.

In our Communication Workshop Facilitator Training Program we have an Acknowledgment Process. The average Facilitator Candidate takes about 60 hours to complete the process. It simply consists of another asking the following and other similar questions, "For what incomplete would you like to be acknowledged?" Each of us have hundreds and hundreds of incompletes; they serve as barriers to being. Back