Periodically, I get asked why, at age 86, I’m still writing blogs. Usually the person asking is in their sixties or seventies. It’s a question that just keeps coming up again and again in spite of the fact that 62% of my blog viewers are under age 34, and 55% are using mobile devices—all of which says a lot and is very satisfying for me. But the older age of my questioners makes my answer easy. I just say something along the line of wanting to keep my gray matter working, lest it slow down. Older adults understand that response and seem to be happy with it. There’s truth in that answer. But actually, it’s a brushoff.
To understand why I still write, you’ll first need to understand my life as a child and adolescent. I was the elder of two sons, three years apart, in a profoundly dysfunctional family. My mother was a flaming narcissist and, as my brother said over her grave, “a mean lady.” My father had divorced her two years into my life—a rare act in the 1930s--and then remarried her when he realized my younger brother was on the way. I cannot remember a single week in my entire life before leaving for college when there were not emotional fights and tears. My father actually attempted suicide once. When angry, he broke plates and cups on the floor, then went off hunting with his dogs and a Black buddy, in season and out. Of course, there were significant consequences of all that to my life. To protect myself, I learned to become deceptive, a tool which I have mostly unlearned. My language skills were always the best tools for self-protection. Whenever possible, I retreated to books—books of all kinds—in my search for new language and new ideas. My brother lacked my language competencies. He wasn’t even a good liar—the primary tool for avoiding our mother. Instead, he was the family scapegoat. The two of us had little relationship. Always in trouble, he was sent off to three private schools in his junior high and high school years. Two, out-of-state, before my dad finally shipped him off to the army at age eighteen. The differences between my brother and myself were also instructive. It was one more driver of my language and relational learning. With my background in psychology, I now understand that he was an attachment avoidant and I was a low-level anxious avoidant—a dysfunction that, calculatingly, I worked on changing throughout the first 10 years of my adult life.
What’s obvious, and also profoundly frustrating, is that my mother was my teacher--and an exceptionally capable tutor. Attendance in her school was compulsory and I spent 24 hours a day figuring out how to win the top grades. My best friend recently described that learning as highly reflective. Continually ruminating, I spent all those years attempting to outsmart her. It was language, I kept confirming. It was always the best tool. I worked hard at becoming linguistically effective, eventually escaping, marrying a wonderful woman and moving to another world. It turns out that having someone believe in my failure enabled my success. My friend, also said, laughing, that I would have been a superb Courtier in the Court of Elizabeth the First. I’d be able to manage all the politics and come away rich. My brother, in significant contrast, decided that the best way to manage our mother was to escape. And he spent his years at home attempting to escape her clutches—usually failing. Elizabeth’s henchmen would have tracked him down and murdered him. Essentially that’s what happened. It just took my mother 70 years...
The church was central to our life, even though I never thought it impacted my parents’ relationship. But, though evangelical, it would be considered a cathedral church, with fairly intelligent preaching and an absolutely fabulous choir and organ. It provided still more linguistic opportunity for me. I retreated regularly to its confines, as well as to the extensive choral music opportunities provided by our church musicians and our superb public-school system.
With all that background, language became central to my life—spoken language, written language and sung language. I read. I listened. I performed. And I interacted. I did not write seriously until well into graduate school. Though I read constantly, it was oral language that most intrigued me. No wonder that I became a fine preacher, taught preaching in a theological seminary, finished a doctorate in communication and rhetoric and eventually became a management consultant, focusing on development—largely oriented toward business communication applied to relational competencies.
With this background, it is inevitable that language will always be important. So much that language ideas are nearly always running through my brain. And when I don’t sleep well, it’s because of my “busy brain.” This isn’t merely a choice. It’s an intrinsic demand that I understand and figure out and put words to everything. Along with my demands for language, I’ve always been driven, even controlled by curiosity. As a child and adolescent, curiosity, rumination and words kept me out of trouble. But it is the underlying curiosity that drives my linguistic identity and my uncontrollable compulsion to write. I don’t fully understand this combination. I just know it’s there. And fulfilling that compulsion is liberating and deeply satisfying.
Given that background, I believe there are four significant motives for my writing, comparable to George Orwell’s similar compulsion. But my world is very different than his, so, I define and contextualize these motives differently. My motivational priorities change from week to week, year to year and decade to decade.
However, my motives and writing are always contextual. They grow not only out of my past life, which I’ve described, but also out of the issues, conflicts, needs and certainly the subject matter of the time in which I exist.
- Sheer egoism. The term refers to self-interest--a person’s welfare. It’s my desire to be clever and to be recognized for it. Clearly it also is to get even with my mother’s use and rejection of me and to do it masterfully. I will die, getting even with what she did to me. At this stage of my life, it’s compulsive but not at all destructive. It’s the source of positive stress in my life.
In 1985, Harvard’s David McClelland wrote that three motives determine what business executives do. He identified the three as power, mastery and affiliation. We all have some of each within us, but business people typically are more driven more by affiliation. The movies would like you to think that it’s power, but the research reveals that more than any other motive, business people most desire affiliation, wanting time with their families and friends. They are affiliatively driven. In stark contrast, it’s very clear that my primary driver is not affiliation or power, but mastery. It clearly responds to the demands of my mother.
Years ago, I taught a class in church with about 50 people, many from the local university, about these three drives. More than half of them instantly recognized my mastery orientation. Several got a kick out of it, pointing it out and chuckling, giving me personal illustrations from my work. I knew it, except I was unaware it was that obvious. One of them, following me out after the class, pointed out that I wouldn’t be staying long as pastor. The opportunities, he said, were too limited in church and I needed a more challenging context. A few weeks after that conversation, I accepted a position as seminary professor in Minnesota, a position with a new context that would also provide me the opportunity to study with one of the leading rhetoricians in the country at the University of Minnesota—about five miles from the seminary. That motivation is also why I have two masters degrees, half of a third, a PhD and a year of post-doc work, related one way or another to linguistic and rhetorical competency. And three highly-successful careers. With much satisfaction and even some inverted thankfulness, I’m still giving the finger to my long-deceased mother.
- Aesthetic enthusiasm. This is my perception that vocabulary and words in the right arrangement are beautiful. I have long remembrances of sermons, speeches and conversations when simply the sound of my prose grabbed my listeners and conversationalists. Numerous people have talked about these abilities in all kinds of situations. They’ve especially commented on my penchant for call and response in the pulpit. And I’m as hooked on written language as the oral. It even drives my rewriting and the cautions I’ve put in place to achieve the aesthetic.
In one instance while working with a senior vice-president and his colleague—a Brit—I went into oral prose brilliance, unconsciously, to make my point. The Brit, taken aback, complimented me, saying that he’d never heard an American who could speak that well. It’s this ability in the nearly 40 years of consulting, that is also fundamental to both gaining and retaining clients.
So, I take a lot of pleasure in the impact of one sound or another--in words and their right arrangement. I seem to automatically shift into this prose in my desire to share an important experience or—focus creatively.
It’s obvious that this pleasure surfaces in my blogging, though I have to work at it.
- Historical impulse. This is the writer’s ability to see things as they are, find out what’s really going on and store them up for posterity. I’ve always wanted to do the very best to serve my clients and readers. It’s reflected in an East Coast client’s comment that no matter how long it took, I’d be there to help him even though the original contract had run out. You will also notice that many of my blogs, emphasizing that impulse, openly challenge conventional wisdom.
There are two reasons for this. First, I find that far too many consultants lack both the expertise and the wisdom to provide quality intellectual and practical support. Ninety percent of all development is relational and interpersonal. Most consultants can put words together, but they lack the background to understand how language works and use it more constructively. They understand neither language form or genre. For example, they have difficulty selecting the appropriate question format for an interaction, much less the words and arrangements for success. And it’s rare for a consultant to understand why one question format works and another doesn’t.
In addition, few can dissect behaviors into small enough bits for the client to actually engage in profound learning. You don’t get that ability from mere communication expertise. You need to be a rhetorical critic, understanding how language works, its subtexts and why only certain values in a specific context can reinforce a given word format. I don’t expect that of clients, but I have taught many of them how to atomistically break apart a behavior so that it will be learnable and never forgotten.
The second value supporting my historical impulse is highly personal. It’s also why I believe transactional relationships are diseased and childish. I cannot count the number of people who have taken me under their wings, guiding, coaching, and mentoring me without expecting the slightest sense of obligation. Obviously, my focus is enhanced by the horror of my mother’s impact upon my early life--and the rich life I’ve been able to live over the past thirty years.
So, I see communication and my blog-writing as a moral, not transactional behavior. Thinking of it as a debt is gross. I don’t write because of what another did for me. I write because I see life and relationships as gift. Throughout my background, I have given of myself to others, driven by a strong sense of gift. On a rare occasion, I might cut off a relationship because of a person’s lack of commitment. But, I pride myself on my ability to work with a highly diverse group of people. Thus inevitably, my worldview is focused on community. The desire to acquire pales in contrast to the motivational power of relationships. Thus, I am committed most to social and economic justice, what I perceive to be the biblical and Islamic imperative, clearly emphasizing unity in diversity.
- Political purpose. I use political in the widest possible sense. It’s the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter or shift other people’s sense of the kind of world they should strive after. My writing is oriented to the political bias reflected in my historical impulse, whether obvious and conscious or not.
Writing, like talking, is never free of political bias. The writer may be completely unaware of bias, but it’s there just the same. Even the idea that a person’s blog should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude built on a specific set of assumptions. All disciplines work from a specific set of assumptions. When put in print, their assumptions are always reflective of bias.
One rather thoughtless, inevitably destructive bias comes from therapy. For example, the profoundly overworked orientation to codependency is built on a specific set of assumptions, growing out of both Freud and drug violence. Both Freud and drug therapies are built on a core belief in the importance of the separate self. Thus, autonomy, individuation, firm self-boundaries and the increasing use of logic and abstract thought are seen as the basic markers of maturity. So American children are raised to become more and more independent, to develop the ability to separate emotion from thought, and to stand on their own two feet. Freud believed that the purpose of therapy was to help the client become safe, building thick boundaries that could reinforce his separateness and enable growth with as little conflict as possible. Codependency theory analogized from drug violence to all therapy, arguing that maintaining and protecting the individual marks true health, emphasizing separation--and thus pathologizing love, concern and any possibility of healthy dependence. In fact, many counselors reject any form of dependency. Even the few that respond come up with little more than conventional adolescent morality.
But psychology from the get-go, in its attempts to equal the validity of the scientific disciplines, modeled itself after Newtonian physics, rooted in Baconian models of science. That physics believed that separate, distinct entities existed in space and acted on each other in predictable and measurable ways. It easily led to the notion that a person, like atoms, is bounded and contains “molecular identity.” Although it’s thought to be a natural fact, the self is actually a social construct—and certainly not our inherent, natural state. Extensive evolutionary research from the end of the last century and throughout this century has found that the core of the human is essential relational not individual, not a “molecular identity.” And that our brains and bodies are meant to grow in connection. But at least 90% of therapy is built, not on the relationship or the interaction but focused on the individual, a strategy, once more, that emphasizes protection and boundaries, autonomy and independence, pitting our neurobiology and innate unconscious against inherent reality and creating tons of stress. That seriously limits the possibility of true healthiness. What could be a more political statement?
When I look back over more than 1100 blog posts since 2009, the posts that lacked a political purpose were the ones that were lifeless and without meaning. Personal courage took time for me to develop. But happily, I notice that the more recent posts are political, offering health and life.