OWNING YOUR OWN CONTROLS (from an audio tape script)
By Eldon Taylor, Ph.D.


What makes the difference between two children raised in the same
environment with the same parents when one ends up a
neuro-surgeon and the other a hardened violent criminal?  What
makes the difference between two patients suffering in a hospice
center from identical conditions when one requires very little
medication and is liked by all, while the other suffers bitterly
regardless of the medication and no one really wants to be around
them?  What are the subtle differences that seem to allow one
person to live a certain life style free of illness while another
doing the same things becomes ill as a result?  What defines a
stimulus as stressful to one while the same exact stimulus is
welcomed with excitement by another?  The answer is so simple as
to be overly obvious.

In my work, I have had the opportunity to work with a wide range
of individuals in differing settings, ranging from the inmate
incarcerated in maximum security to the terminal patient in the
hospice center.  Over the years my observations ultimately led to
this hypothesis:  the persons who seem to suffer most consider
themselves to be victims.  The classic victim scenario in the
prison generally goes something like this: all but for the grace
of God there go you.  Translated by the inmate population, this
means something like, "What would you do?  Where would you be?
After all, my daddy was an alcoholic, my mother was a prostitute
and the neighbor boy hung heroine on me when I was only eight".

The fact is, our environment and circumstance do imprint us in
profound ways.  Our very ability to cope depends in large on our
choices and they are predetermined in large by our enculturation
process.  Thus, what else could the victim of these tragedies do?

We all grow up with some substantially similar ideas and notions
about what is fair and acceptable. We all tend to say things like
"When I'm a parent, I'll do it differently";  and yet, when our
children act in some way that meets with our disapproval, we
respond just as our parents did.  Psychologist call this process
imprinting.  In very simple terms, if you raise a duckling with
chickens, it will behave as a chicken.  There is a marvelous
story that illustrates this point.

It seems one day that an eagle flew over a chicken coop.  To his
amazement, pecking in the yard below, was a large gathering of
chickens and a lone, beautiful female eagle.  He swooped down for
a closer look and the chickens together with the eagle fled to
the chicken house.  For days the eagle watched the chickens from
a distance until one day he was certain that he could stop the
beautiful eagle before she reached the chicken house.  With the
prowess of an eagle he was suddenly in between the eagle and the
chicken house.  She trembled.  He spoke, "What are you doing
living down here like a chicken".  She answered, "I am a
chicken".  He argued, showing her the similarities between
himself and her.  He told her of what it was like to be an eagle
and soar high above the earth.  His stories only frightened her.
Finally she said, "Well if I'm an eagle then you will not harm
me".  He responded in the affirmative.  She said, "Then step back
and show me."  As he stepped backed she seized the opportunity to
run into the chicken house.  When the other chickens questioned
her about the encounter, she told them all of how she had
outsmarted the eagle.  Of course, all the chickens commended her
for tricking the eagle.

Many of us are like the female eagle.  We outsmart ourselves with
betrayals of who we really are.  Our choices are predicated on
our beliefs and our beliefs have been adopted from the same
process inherent to the story about the chickens and the chicken
house.  Here is another example of how this kind of reason
pervades who and what we are.

One day a man walking the streets of Manhattan passed beneath a
high rise complex that consisted of very expensive condominiums.
As he passed under the balcony of one of the two story units a
flower pot which had been placed precariously close to the
balcony edge fell and crashed down on his head.  Now imagine this
man's choices.  What could he do?  What would be the normal thing
to do?  Well, he could take the broken pot back to its owners and
put it guess where.  Administer a beating to the idiot that put
the flower pot too close to the edge, that's what most people
respond with as their first thought when I have presented this
scenario to audiences.  What else could he do?  Well, he could be
metaphysical.  You know, kismet, what's to be will be, after all,
maybe the blow to his head rearranged some neurons and now he
will experience higher consciousness.  So just be metaphysical
and act as if it was supposed to happen and just go on down the
road.  What else could he do?  Well, he could be an opportunist.
You know that flower pot fell from a wealthy person's ledge.
Whip lash, concussion, something like that---sue the sucker!

What else could he do?  What would you do?  How about taking the
flower to a florist, potting it and returning it as a gift of
love?  Could you just as well do that?  Of all the possibilities,
which one do you think would produce the best outcome for
yourself in terms of happiness, wholeness and even health?

The fact is, the normal person has been trained to behave in a
normal manner.  Normal means that they have a right to become
angry and exact punishment.  Robert Laing once said something
like "normal man has educated himself to be normal and thus to
become absurd" in his book THE POLITICS OF EXPERIENCE.  The
emotional reaction termed anger is just one such absurdity.  What
happens to the body when one becomes normal is no less than a
weakening of the immune system and further, suspended states of
fight flight, or as we know it in more modern man, anxiety and
depression, literally produce chemistry that is toxic to the
human condition.  As Dr.'s Steven Locke and Douglas Colligan
point out in their book, THE HEALER WITHIN, these hostile
emotions, victim, if you will, feelings, literally can condition
the body in the direction of disease as well as produce certain
diseases in and of themselves (1986).

The correct answer in our flower pot analogy is of course, pot
the flower and return it as a gift.  The idea is not foreign in
terms of possible alternatives and yet it is seldom ever
considered.  Our choices arise from our definitions and they have
been incubated all too often in chicken houses, but let's stop
for a moment and look at one of the preferred enculturated
choices from the human chicken house.  My work and research has
demonstrated that for every fear there is an anger response.
Sometimes the anger is withheld, turned in, and sometimes it is
acted out.  Nevertheless, there is no such thing as anger without
some fear underpinning it!  Now, what exactly is anger?  My
examination of this cycle of fear and anger has given rise to an
acronym that I often use when describing anger.  A---a,
N---nasty, G---getting, E---even, R---response. A nasty getting
even response.  If fear and anger are circular, what is it that
gives rise to feeling frightened, anxious or nervous, becoming
angry and responding in a fight/flight way when the stimulus is
something like the way my employer speaks to me, the way my
significant other looks at me, or just the stuff one feels when
cut off in five o'clock traffic and given the infamous bird.
None of these things are truly life threatening and after all,
isn't that what the fight/flight functions are wired in for, the
preservation of the species?

Dr. Carl LaPresch used to speak of the four "F's" in his
introductory lectures regarding basic psychology.  These four
primitive drives were the basis for most behavior.  In fact, it
was Carl who first suggested to me that perhaps the highest act
of human consciousness was cortical inhibition---over riding the
wired in responses that can occur in the primitive brain.  The
four "f's" are easy to remember and oriented to species
preservation:  fight, flight, feeding and---well the propagation
of the species.

Why then a fight/flight response to a synthetic stimuli---that is
a stimuli that is not life threatening?  What special lens do we
attach to certain events in life that give rise to a perception
of threat when indeed the threat is not a tiger in hot pursuit?
My early hypothesis regarding the fear/anger loop eventually led
to the conclusion that perceived threats were rejection oriented.
In other words, our individual intrinsic value was denied.
Interestingly though, for most of us, the normal strategy for
avoiding rejection is itself the ultimate rejection.  There are
two ways to be tied up in the world.  One is to have someone
literally bind you and another is simply to tether oneself to a
thread, refusing either to pull hard enough to break it or to let
it go.  Many of our beliefs are the product of the latter.  We
refuse to let them go.  Like the eagle raised by the chickens, we
know what we are expected to do and define our behavior
accordingly.  Thus, to resolve conflict we establish strategies
designed to protect us from rejection.  Among these strategies
our defense mechanisms function, as well as our attitudes, toward
everything we will encounter in our lives.

When I was a boy my definitions included labels and what I have
termed for years as the no-don't syndrome.  In my many lectures
throughout America and Europe, the audience has repeatedly
verified that my experience was not unique.  Indeed, it was the
rule.  If this generalization applies, then most of us were
raised with statements like:
     "You're not old enough."
"You're stupid or that's stupid."
"Children are to be seen and not heard."
"Don't do this"---"you can't do that"---and so forth as well as a
host of labels.

It was not long before I was wearing glasses and one of my best
friends was black.  My early definitions were in direct conflict
with my experience; still, various strategies for coping with
this conflict developed, albeit most unconsciously.

It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I learned that not only
did I wear glasses and have black friends, but my grandfather was
Jewish and my great grandmother was Native American.  For years I
had coped by demonstrating that I was "tough enough" to wear
glasses and not get called four-eyes and to stand up for what
just inherently seemed wrong and later became known to me as
bigotry and racism.  In other words, my defense strategy was
compensatory---aggression would align my inner with the
outer---my experience with my training as a child could avoid
conflict by simply becoming too tough for someone to challenge my
behavior.

The result was devastating.  Not only did I poison myself, but
the never ending quest to justify my actions produced increasing
needs for aggression.  My relationships deteriorated and/or were
destroyed, and well, you can just imagine the havoc wreaked in my
own life.  The method of choice for conflict in my particular
upbringing was aggressive---and hostility was the norm.

What I have found over the years of life and work is that once
again, this was not a unique pattern.  Oh, the circumstances may
vary from individual to individual, but the essence of the lesson
never did.  The result for many of us is a mechanism called
blame.  That brings us right back to our inmate whose daddy was
an alcoholic and so forth.  Alas, a light went on that set years
of work and research into perspective, at least for me.

Now here is the bottom line: as long as one blames anything or
anyone they are effectively tied up.  There is nothing they can
do.  They are victims of their circumstances.  They can only but
whimper.  As victims, they are helpless.  As victims, perhaps
they are even due benefits such as sympathy, attention, special
care and so on.  But as victims, they are not in charge of their
circumstances and/or their responses.

Applying this theory I discovered that regardless of the
circumstances, from hospice to prison, the suffering was directly
related to blame or "victim-hood".  What is more, I discovered
that on the opposite side of this continuum, rested the self
responsible.  The person who assumed control of their own life
and found creative solutions for difficult situations---returning
the flower, if you will, replanted in a new flower pot.

These responsible individuals were in charge of their own inner
environments.  Their secret was simple, they did not become angry
and involved in blame.  Oh they did not necessarily accept
everyone or anything, in fact, quite the contrary in some
instances, but they did not waste time eliminating their
possibilities by divesting their power via blame.  They took the
initiative to resolve situations positively and assumed the
responsibility for doing so.  Unlike the whimpering victim, they
were what they made of the stuff of life and accepted so.

There is an interesting experiment that has been replicated many
times and perhaps addresses the effect this kind of
hopelessness/helplessness mentality can have on physical health.
Dogs were placed in Pavlovian slings where they could do nothing
when electric shock was administered by psychologist Martin
Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania in an experiment to
determine the effects of helplessness.  Seligman suggests that
many of us have learned that nothing can be done in many
circumstances to make a difference.  Once the dogs were
conditioned to the shock they were then placed in cages with
floors that on one side of the cage an electric grid could be
used to apply shock while on the other side of a low barrier wall
the dog could escape the shock.  What Seligman discovered has
many ramifications.  Dogs who had not been conditioned in the
sling ran around frantically when shock was first administered.
They learned to jump the small wall and escape the shock.  They
became so good at it that when the electricity was turned on,
they simply got up and casually jumped over the wall.  However,
dogs that had been conditioned to the sling ran frantically at
first just as the unconditioned dogs but soon quit and only
whimpered.  They accepted the shock passively and thus the
whimpering shocked dog metaphor (Ibid).  This sense or
conditioned belief in victim-hood has been demonstrated to effect
the immune system in a negative manner.  The Institute of Noetic
Sciences has funded much of the research in what is now termed
PNI or psychoneuroimmunology and this body of work shows clearly,
as does the entire body of literature regarding mind/body
wellness, that the deleterious effects of certain mental
processes on the body can literally kill (     ).  Nothing I
could do---helplessness---victim-hood---this side of the
responsibility equation is among the worst of mental processes
one can adopt regardless of its source.  In fact, in a paper that
is now in press, we learned from a follow-up study of terminally
diagnosed patients conducted by PROGRESSIVE AWARENESS RESEARCH,
that the physicians attitude is somehow more influential on
patient life expectancy than either the treatment modality or the
patients attitude toward their future, their responsibility
regarding the disease and/or their outcome expectation.  Somehow
the attitude of the physician is assumed to have been
communicated to the patient for in every single instance where
the physicians responded to the questionnaire regarding patients
role in terms of the positive use of their mind with neutral to
negative evaluation, the patient died.  The study generally
indicated a survival rate of over 30% for all respondents
(remission) and an increase in life by up to three years over
time given in prognosis for those patients whose physicians
generally agreed that the mind has a role in patient health even
in the face of "terminal" illness.  The assumption suggests that
one must fully accept the responsibility for their own lives and
mental processes even if that means guarding against the
influence of another.

What then is the pragmatic to overcome, or I prefer, to outgrow,
this early conditioning.   Once again, it's so simple as to be
difficult---difficult to believe and difficult to do.  The answer
is forgive!  In my research we began applying three messages as
cognitive tools to untie the victim.  They are called the
forgiveness set and consist of these three statements:
I forgive myself;
I forgive all others; and
I am forgiven.

When you forgive, you can not blame.  If you do not blame it's
exceedingly difficult to become angry.  What you cannot become
angry about, you do not fear.  When there is nothing to fear,
there is nothing to become angry about or no one to blame.  Life
is simply a miracle and living is the process of maximizing the
miraculous experience.  Every thought or deed becomes therefore
differently oriented.  When you accept responsibility for
everything in your universe, you gain the power to make changes.
The real changes are made in you and thus your experience of life
and self become qualitatively different almost immediately.

You are in charge of your inner environment, and your beliefs,
attitudes and emotions do matter to you.  Your health, your
enjoyment of life, your ability to become all that you are is
inescapably involved in your ability to forgive and let go.

But alas, you may say, that's all too simple and further life
sucks and then we die.  And I am sure you can find many that will
agree.  Still, if you want to see the barnyard from the sky,
spread your wings and see for yourself.  Seeing is believing.
Try it---I promise, you'll like it.  And if necessary, fake it
until you make it.

(Note: If you would like a free catalog of the books and tapes by
this author, E-Mail 73534,1171 or phone 1-800-964-3551).