Journal Entry for April 2003

April 6, 2003

Liberation Psychology and Nonviolence

Heaven arms with Love
Those it would not see destroyed.
                         -Taoist Teaching

The world today needs nonviolence. Our military violence cannot reassure us about our safety. We need to liberate ourselves from the conditioning of violence and to embrace absolute nonviolence. Embracing love, kindness, compassion, and generosity is a way of modeling the moral high road. Actions and thoughts influence the soul. To protect the soul and to guarantee her growth we need to struggle against the cognitive and emotional distortions of hatred, revenge, and violence.

Liberation Psychology is humanistic and transpersonal. Natural actions that spring from human nature make impressions on the soul. Love is a human instinct that is expressed by all the religions of the world. Nonviolence is the tool to heal internal cognitive distortions so the natural force of love can be expressed. To live nonviolently, all images of hatred, revenge, greed, and self-centeredness have to be eradicated. This is a utopian vision that is a standard to evaluate all other behavior against. It is a goal that does not demand perfection but that values process. We are always incomplete, and the internal value of love measures our actions and puts demands on us to strive for completeness.

Love and nonviolence form a basic need category that is one of 10 categories of basic needs that create the foundation of Liberation Psychology. These are basic need gratifications that must be satisfied for peace on earth. They are basic needs that pull the individual out of her internal meanderings and demand that she be related to other individuals and communities.

Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology, postulated a hierarchy of basic needs and brought back into psychology the possibility of human instincts. David Buss in his textbook Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science Of The Mind, (1999) confirms that Maslow was correct in advocating for the instinctual quality of human nature. Researchers R.A. Spitz and R.C. Lipton (cited in Wenar, 1994, pp. 380-381) studied lack of nurturance and the physical damage that this lack does to the growth process of children. David Buss writes:

From an evolutionary perspective, however, the reasons for deep parental love do seem clear, or at least understandable. It is reasonable to expect that selection has designed precisely such psychological mechanisms – parental mechanisms of motivation designed to ensure the survival and reproductive success of the invaluable vehicles that transport an individual's genes into the next generation (1999, p. 191).

Practitioners of Developmental Psychopathology have shown that the damage that lack of nurturance and the violence in child abuse cause could be permanent (Berger, 1998; Papalia, Olds and Feldman, 1998). Violence and lack of love could traumatize the child physiologically, causing cell damage (Rothschild, 2000).

Thirty years as a psychotherapist and several years as an adjunct faculty member of the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Institute, researching and teaching about violence and nonviolence, have given me two scientific viewpoints on what causes violence and what engenders the human need for love and nonviolence. A child or adolescent in psychotherapy who suffers from low self-esteem and feels inferior when he compares himself with his peers and feels inferior in social relationships and sees himself incompetent in the classroom will probably also have feelings of rejection and isolation. Such a child or adolescent is more inclined to act out in the classroom and do something in his social life to seek some sort of status. This child is usually punished for his inappropriate social behavior in his family and with his peers. His classroom behavior problems will probably cause him to be punished by his teachers or principal and will cause him to feel alienated from his peers.I have seen in my private practice that children who feel inferior, rejected, and isolated interpret the punishment that they receive from their family and school as a lack of nurturance and love and as a form of violence. The parents and school officials seldom have heard of the Cognitive Behavioral Psychology and the Behavioral Psychology research on the problem of punishment. The lack of nurturance or the neglect and the punishment interpreted as violence is a sure prediction of violence in our families, schools, communities, and society.

Liberation Psychology uses Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, and Mother Theresa as examples of principled people who are willing to do direct action to bring love and nonviolence to the poor and oppressed children of the world.

References
Beck, A. T. (1999). Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence. New York: HarperCollins.

Berger, K. S. (1998). The Developing Person Through the Life Span (4th ed.) New York: Worth.

Maslow, A. H. (1971). The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Viking.

Papalia, D. E., Olds, S. W., and Feldman, R. D. (1998). Human Development (7th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Rothschild, B. (2000). The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. New York: W. W. Norton.

Wenar, C. (1994). Developmental Psychopathology: From Infancy Through Adolescence. New York: McGraw-Hill.