Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine ( the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers )

Welcome to Friends and Readers of the Wakefield Doctrine. As we start the 3rd or 4th, (clarks really don’t keep track of time very well) Year of the Wakefield Doctrine blogsite, we want to  start with a little guidance for our new Readers. (This is especially directed to our increasing following from ‘the FaceBook’) if you are here because you have an interest in personality theories and self-improvement systems, you are definitely in the right place. The Wakefield Doctrine is a ‘theory’ that allows you to understand the behavior of the people in your life in a way, to a depth of insight that no other personality theory can offer. The thing is, this site is organized in a fairly unorganized manner. As you see, there are Posts (most recent ones first) and there are Sections that lead to Pages that contain information about the how, why and wherefores of the Doctrine. The establishing information is to be found on these Pages. These Posts are meant to be a ‘conversation’ about the Wakefield Doctrine. If you are here on purpose, and have read this far, then you have the ‘whatever-it-takes’ intellectual capacity to ‘get’ the Wakefield Doctrine. We welcome you to our group. We invite you to Read and Comment and otherwise participate in this thing of ours. 

It may be nothing more than a culturally sanctioned  permission to introspection, or it may be a simple “give the people a chance to rest for a day and believe that their lives are something more than a stuttering march, with time off for creating art and reproduction, to an inevitable extinction at the end of their useful lives”; either of these  views have their convincing elements. But trying to understand why the New Year celebration is so different from all the other major holidays on the calendar?  that is not why we are writing this Post.¹  Rather than get all wordy and such,  lets just agree that humans benefit from a period of introspection, a period in which to look back on what they have devoted that most precious of possession (time), trying to accomplish, achieve, avoid, abdicate,appropriate,adjudicate (and any other words starting with the letter ‘a’ that you may have in your working vocabulary.)
This is our starting point for today’s Post. (Well, to be accurate, that is one of two starting points of today’s Post²)

So we were in the car, on normal weekly Saturday Night Drive last night and the conversation, as it often does, found itself wrestling with the question of ‘change’.  The word wrestling is quite an apt description, as the participants in last night’s Drive were 2 scotts and 1 clark. (DS#1, glenn and me). As students of the Wakefield Doctrine know, the scottian personality type does not rank the drive for self-improvement very highly. A scott, living in the here and now as they do, look at themselves and their lives and see it as good. They are not inclined to take the difficult step out of their normal view of life (out) to  place beyond the here and now, in order to gain a different, objective perspective view of themselves. (That is so not what scotts are inclined to do). In any event, last night the topic drifted over to the idea of ‘Doors’.
‘Doors’ is a term used as a reference to certain decision points in life during which major changes  occur. What makes these ‘Doors’ so fascinating is that they occur in a very limited space of time, making it rather easy to see them. The example of a ‘Door’ that formed the center of  last night’s discussion was my visiting an Emergency Room to get a condition diagnosed.
I made the trip to find out what was the cause of my headache, earache and other head related  aches and pains.  It does not take being a hypochondriac to think to your self, “hey this is probably nothing more than some ear infection, but it could also be a damn brain tumor”.  That is when you know that you have a ‘Door’ in your immediate future. When there are possibilities and probabilities that have not been determined, the path of your life can fork in dramatic ways. The actual experience of going to an Emergency Room is simply amazing on so many levels (if you are clark, that is.)  When the kindly but totally impersonal admitting person places their identification band to your wrist everything changes. You become a patient…in the care of the institution, the wrist band makes you theirs.  All around you, in the separate treatment rooms, you hear the sounds of people becoming sicker or better (“hey, turns out it  was nothing, after all!” or  “hey do you have a cell phone, I better call my wife”)
Like a room full of confessionals, complete with cloth drapes for the illusion of privacy, you sit and you wait for the most important person in your life to come into the room and pass judgement. That is a ‘Door’.

Fortunately for me, my ‘Door’ was not as dramatic as it might have been. The most important thing that happened was that I was allowed to leave. Some people, people who sat across the waiting room from me when I entered the building did not leave, instead they had their clothing taken and they were ‘wheeled away’. There is an odd, unstated ‘politeness’ seen among emergency room patients, an unspoken agreement not to stare, not to comment on the condition of others, those unfortunate people that get wheeled away on rolling beds.
This, ‘not looking’  is not so much denying them recognition, rather you are acknowledging that they are now a part of a process that you have, at least this time, avoided. And they let you leave. No one doesn’t feel better, if only for a moment, when they clip your wristband off and you are allowed to walk out of the building.

So that is what a ‘Door’ is, in terms of the Wakefield Doctrine. And that is a concept that scotts (and rogers) do not normally have access to, clarks do.

So the question, “is it good or desirable or necessary to seek the means to change”? Or  is the goal of self-improvement a delusional, live-inside-your head trap that clarks always seem to let themselves get caught up in?

Stay tuned. In the coming year we are so going to focus on that topic. In the mean time. remember this:

The Wakefield Doctrine is a unique and productive and fun way to understand the behavior of the people in our lives. With the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine, you will know more about the other person than they know about themselves.

See you later. Watch this space for a photo Post of Jasmine Tea and DownSpring glenn…

1) well, yes you are correct it is very likely that that is why we are writing all of these Posts

2) as you have gathered this is one of those Posts that attempts to offer two or more types of Readers the opportunity to get some from these things