How Distortions in Communication
Interfere with Nonviolence, Part II

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

In my article last month, I laid a foundation to understand the ecological basis of distortions in thinking, feeling and body gestures. Distortions in communications interrupt nonviolent practices in family life and create obstacles to living a life of love in action. Exaggerations, minimizations, denials and misrepresentations interfere with the profoundly influential expression and living out of compassion and justice.

In the last article I named and described eight distortions of thinking and feeling. The following list of nine types completes my summary of 17 common distortions. These articles have been influenced by the ideas of Neil Bernstein, Carroll Izard, Philip Kendall and Robert Leahy.

The Distortions

9. Guilties: You feel like everything you do is wrong, and like someone is going to catch you at your weaknesses. "The teacher said Johnny is having trouble in math. I should have helped him more. It's my fault."

10. It's All About Me: Everything that happens is somehow about you. While talking with a group of people, someone yawns and you think, "They want to leave. I must be boring."

11. Finger Pointing: You never do anything wrong. Other people are always at fault, so you don't have to change your own behavior. "My teacher makes me hate school. She always says I'm making trouble when she lets other kids get away with murder."

12. Never Measure Up: Your real self can never live up to your ideal self and you compare yourself with friends who you perceive as doing better than you. "I was the class president and valedictorian and now I'm just a secretary. Betty is so much better than me. She's a corporate executive."

13. I Blew It: You can't let go of past mistakes and lost opportunities. "I love that old song. Every time I hear it I wish I had married my first true love. She would have treated me like a man."

14. Doomsday: You play the game of "Yes, but..." which makes you feel everything is bound for failure. "My doctor says my physical was perfect, but what if they missed something? Maybe they got my blood test mixed up with someone else's at the lab." "Yes, I'm happy Billy is coming home for Thanksgiving, but he hates turkey."

15. The Heart Is Always Right: You know your heart cannot mislead you and your experience tells you that your feelings are always right. "I don't care what you say. My heart tells me you are lying."

16. This is My Truth: You are adamant about your perceptions and you get angry when other people disagree with you. It is more important to keep your truth than to maintain the possibility for negotiation. "This is my truth! You can't take it away from me."

17. Opinionated One: You have something to say about everything and everyone. "I know he can be a good man if he just finds the right woman." "I know she is a fine woman, but there are no men good enough for her."

Communications between family members that are filled with distortions of thinking and feeling, such as those listed above, can cause extremely high levels of inconsistency and coercion in the family environment. This atmosphere can then create troubled or dysfunctional children. It may cause the children to experience abnormal reactions of exaggerated sadness, fear, anger and aggression.

Internalizers

Family distorted thinking and feeling patterns that create a lot of sadness frequently teach the children to be helpless and to feel hopeless. Families that experience a lot of fear because of poor communications may raise children who see and hear a threatening world. The sad and fearful child is prone to internalize their problems and therefore will lack feedback from other people to correct their distorted thinking and feeling. Their peers often reject the internalizers, the children of sadness and fear, and they might begin to hate themselves, becoming depressed and suicidal. Sad children lack the initiative or motivation to maintain the effort it takes to make peer relationships work. Children of fear feel too threatened and are too defensive to interact successfully with others; and their peers do not have the energy and patience to maintain the relationship.

Externalizers

Distorted thinking and feeling families that create an atmosphere of anger and aggression have children who externalize the distortions by arguing with adults and breaking adult rules. Some externalizers interfere with the rights of others and have no empathy or remorse for hurting other people. Their peers also usually reject children who express their distortions of thinking and feeling by acting out, breaking the rules and ignoring the rights of others. Sometimes their anger comes out in passive aggressive ways of relating to parents and schoolteachers, with unmet promises to do their chores and homework. They may scream to get attention, blame others for their own misbehaviors or cut classes at school. Their anger is entrenched and maintained by stubbornness.

Social Skills

Children who have distorted thinking and feeling lack the necessary social competency to have relationships that teach them how to relate to peers. Fear or anger create barriers that interfere with the cognitive development that helps them to trust, share and see the view point of their peers. Their capacity for empathy is interfered with because of their misinterpretation of other people's intentions. For example, a sad child will distort a friend's wanting to go home as proof that they do not like them. Or an angry child will interpret their friend's leaving as an insult to them. An adolescent whose feeling and thinking is distorted by anger and aggression might interpret a friendly or neutral communication as a negative statement or a threat against them that may even lead to a physical altercation. The trouble a child or adolescent has with their peers is made worse by the self-centeredness that is required to maintain the thinking and feeling distortions.

The shy, fearful or sad adolescent will not have the social skills to maintain communications, to understand and to become friends with the opposite sex, so they may suffer from intimacy deprivation. The sad, fear ridden adolescent is boring, too needy and uninteresting to the other teenagers. The angry, aggressive young person who attacks and screams at peers is seen as an immature troublemaker by the other youths. Adolescents who suffer from these deficits in social skills are not apt to get invited to activities like parties on the weekend or sleepovers at friend's houses. They eventually feel like outcasts and suffer from painful loneliness. They become withdrawn, inappropriate and show a lack of self-restraint.

To have friends, these children need to learn to stop their negative inner talk that scares them with exaggerated tension from fear or makes them impulsively angry. It keeps them from listening clearly and sharing with their peers. They need to learn how to identify their emotions and thoughts so that they can control their own behavior and express themselves clearly to peers, teachers and parents. They need to learn relaxation exercises so that the inner talk or automatic thoughts can be slowed down enough to stop the angry impulsive attack or the fear-flight response. Being able to stop and think helps these children to problem solve, develop empathy for others and change the way they interact with peers so that their needs for belonging and approval are met.

The distortions of thinking and feeling that are passed through families from parents to children are powerful influences in a child's development and in their ability to function creatively, effectively and lovingly in their world. Working to build, sustain and celebrate family communications that are as free as possible from distortions of thinking and feeling is of vital importance to nonviolence in families and in nations.

References

Bernstein, N. I. (1996). Treating the Unmanageable Adolescent: A Guide To Oppositional Defiant and Conduct Disorders. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.

Izard, C. E. (1991). The Psychology of Emotions. New York: Plenum Press.

Kendall, P. C. (Ed.). (1991). Child and Adolescent Therapy: Cognitive- Behavioral Procedures. New York: The Guilford Press.

Leahy, R. (Ed.). (1997). Practicing Cognitive Therapy: A Guide to Interventions. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc.