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

behavior (or, as ‘our Ms. Rogers‘ might have it, behaviour ) is today’s word, courtesy of Doctrine Friend Z.

Given that the theme we’ve chosen for our maiden voyage on the good ship ‘A-to-Z April Blog Hop Challenge’ is, the Wakefield Doctrine, the word ‘behavior’ for the second Post  should come as no surprise or seem, in any way, odd or out of place. After all, the Wakefield Doctrine presents itself as a ‘personality theory’, and, a perspective on the behaviour of the people in our lives. It would seem clear that our little personality theory is all about deciphering, decoding, deconstructing and otherwise figuring out why the heck people act the way that they do…especially the people in our immediate lives. From classmates to housemates, roommates to lovers, siblings and co-workers, we all live in an speeded up Lava Lamp of emotions and actions, perceptions and reactions, mostly directed towards us from the world but, of course, we get our opportunities to have at them too! So naturally one would think, ‘well, you Doctrinaires, you surely must spend your days analyzing behaviors and things and…you know, how people act and such.’

Of course, you are probably not that surprised to hear me say, ‘…well no. not really’

Simplest put: the Wakefield Doctrine is not so concerned with a person’s behavior, except for the purpose of providing clues and insight into which of the three is that person’s predominant worldview (aka personality type). It is (this) determining a person’s worldview, that is, in fact, (one of) the key aspects of the Wakefield Doctrine, i.e. can we determine: ‘how does that person relate themselves to the world around them‘.* How a person behaves is a reflection of how (that) person is relating themselves to the world around them and that is the first step to inferring the (personal) reality that constitutes their world. Understanding a person’s reality is to own the dictionary, whereas to trace one behavior to one situation (or conflict or misunderstanding or one preference) is like…well, like assigning one word to each letter of an alphabet.

Not to get too far ahead of the letters and such, but lets end today’s Post with this:

• we observe behavior as clues and indications of a person’s predominant worldview
• we make a specific statement in this regard, i.e. ‘how does this person/my child/that girl I want to go out with/that guy who is such a jerk,  how do they appear to relate themselves to the world around them?’
• when we correctly answer this first question, we are on our way to knowing more about them than they know about themselves…
• your behavior can only be a reflection of the context that you experience …these worldviews that we talk about, that, in fact, this entire Doctrine is predicated upon
• (oh!  yeah…. there are only three worldviews (personal realities), that of the Outsider/clarks, the Predators/scotts and the Herd Members/rogers)
• but we’re not going into a discussion of them now!! we got 27 more letters to assign a topical value to, ya know?
• …(but, since you’ve read this far and you’re really rather nice, I’ll tell you this: this whole thing, the Doctrine and worldviews and the hats and shirts?  all in the service of being able to ‘see the world as the other person is experiencing it’….. mums the word for now.

What the Wakefield Doctrine has to offer regarding behavior comes down to this: ‘(with an understanding of the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine), we need never have to hear ourselves say, ‘how could they do such a thing, I really thought I knew them better than that!’

*note: we are not saying, ‘how does that person relate to the world around them’, that is fundamentally different from what we are concerned with, ‘(how) they relate themselves ….to the world’