Anyone Who Uses Tompkins' Language is a Change Agent....and Beware

• Reintegrative shaming praised by Rich Kuyper, 1/30/97
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    • Response to work stress by Margaret Blakely, LPC, 2/2/97
      
      

Margaret, thank you for your loving attitude toward "employees" in work systems and "offenders" in the "justice" system. Your attitude is so rare (and correct) that you need support and acknowledgement in order to survive these systems. It is a measured fact (Michigan Institute for Social Research) that more than 90% of work organizations are authoritarian. Your attitude of supporting and involving others puts you outside the autarchic norms, and this means like anyone else who is caring, you are at risk for survival in these systems----even more so if you are in a supervisorial position. If your workgroup is a caring and collaborative one (the norms in your work group are caring) and the group operates within a larger negative norm system, everyone in your workgroup is at risk for shaming (the way norms are enforced is by shaming) by organization members outside your group. The normative tension can become so great that everyone in the caring workgroup can be fired (an attack other response by the larger organization that feels shamed by the caring). I have been in this situation and seen it in others.

Keeping a systems perspective on your situation may allow you to justify to yourself the need for keeping your caring behaviors under wraps. And letting the people in your work group share the burden you carry when you give them all a rating of "outstanding." I am recommending that you view your activity as an intervention into a system---and acting strategically in order to survive. This is "change agent" stuff. Anyone outside the norms in a positive way is a change agent, and had better get systems knowledge zip fast, especially these days when everything is headed toward fascism.

For me, personally, it's scary (because of having been outside the norms so often and been punished for it) to learn too much of Don's and the Institute's language of affect. I am steeping myself in shame language, but not going much further, or teaching my clients much more than that (my instruction is much more how my scapegoated clients can survive in an abusive system). If my interest in Tompkins language grows much more, I'm at risk for survival and so are my clients. The more I grow the more of a strategic systems thinker I have to become. The Tomkins Institute may have to develop and train systems survival skills in order for participants to "go out in the world" and stay alive. Actually, this is what Judy's and my Work Abuse book is about: how an abused "employee" can grow and at the same time survive within these destructive systems. The book is so dense with systems information, and twice as long as other books, that shame language is all I dared develop for the reader. I hope someone else will write volume two. I'm tuckered out trying to stay alive within the mental health system that is becoming more corporate (authoritarian) every day.

Judy Wyatt and I have been outside the system so long that maybe you can understand why I feel near tears when I get support like I've received here. Judy is wary of computers, but I tell her what I see happening here. Chauncey.

• Change agent by Margaret Blakely, 2/8/97