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Intro.
To overcome personality politics in our movement is a
complex process of re-networking. The mantra of the system
is that differences reduce to
‘personality conflict’, but
this kind of blame game just won’t do.
- There’s the anger that comes on the surface and is part
of normal contentiousness. But that’s not the real problem,
the real problem is the rage that gets represented in a
person’s inner speech,
their ‘intuitive’ language.
Commonly this rage expresses itself in a forceful and
inchoate way that interferes with interpersonal honesty:
It’s the stuff of difficult attitudes. We disconnect from
our Sensitive Being which is “constantly adapting to the
environment, learning by attending to the linguistic and
bodily cues delivered by others.” [Cushman]
- The personal boundaries of clients, due to the abusive
and traumatic nature of treatment, have been radically
violated. The clients get squeezed closer together
psychologically than do better-defended folk and, with this,
the rage of another hits very hard indeed. Our
personalities are marked by triggers and the tendency to
dissociation, while on the exterior we face the scourge of
discrimination and the distortion of prejudice. Any
solution to the rage question is therefore to be addressed
at the social institution level
of undergroundedness and
poses to us a requirement for serious moral sensitivity.
- The function of inner speech is the self-regulation of
our ‘involvement experience’.
To take responsibility at that
level is a matter of moral understanding, it means connecting
to a strong value system like accountability to the values of
the client culture. We need to strengthen the core of the
person against the attacking rage by way of a spiritual &
visionary approach that converts our own rage into structured
and meaningful endeavor. Conversely personality politics
takes the inner speech as a given and (irresponsibly)
embraces the rage-driven output thereof.
- Personality politics is the bane of the clients movement,
being as ‘stabbing’
leads to fractiousness and inattention to
real concerns. This practice gives an opening for m.h.
systems and individual providers to tokenize and manage us.
The ideology of ‘personality conflict’ seduces us with the
opportunity to ‘be cool’,
giving us the W
as winners, others by default getting the L.
I think it’s obvious that
only by the most determined focus and by networking around
the best constructed ethical uplift system can we hope to
underwrite the Vision of a ‘next level’ in social relations.
Finale. Personality
politics is the choice to rage without
accountability to the client values, to attack ‘for self’
without regard for social responsibility. The right thing to
do is to creatively discipline inner speech because we care
about ‘levitating’ the social process to a new level.
Andrew Phelps
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