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‘G’ -the Wakefield Doctrine-Guilt’ (now, who’s surprised… no, really, anyone?)

April 8, 2015 By

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

G G G

 

…clarks hide it, scotts ignore it and rogers embrace it…  the glue of conformity, the velvet underwear of the conformer, easily the second most popular form of personal self-indulgence

Guilt…Guilt…..Guilt…….Guilt, yeah Guilt

not the easiest of concepts to relate to our little personality theories, but what the hell:

  • guilty pleasures:  rogers!
  • guilty as charged: scotts!
  • guilt and shame: …. (you knew this one, didn’t you!  lol)  clarks!

lets get all Daniel on this here concept here.

guilt  noun \ˈgilt\
: responsibility for a crime or for doing something bad or wrong
: a bad feeling caused by knowing or thinking that you have done something bad or wrong (courtesy: merriamwebstercambridgeoxford.com)

my, that certainly covers the personal reality waterfront, doesn’t it? But, this here blog relates things on a personal level (no! wait!  don’t laugh… I mean, sure, clarks do not strike most people as being excessively personal and/or personable people, at least on first meeting.  funny story: when I was 5 years old I decided that I really should sign any birthday or holiday cars with my full name…even those to immediate family. and the thing is, though I can’t remember the rationale, I still have a sense of the appropriateness of it…at least to my 5 year old self).

clarks feel guilt. ours and anyone else’s that we decide we have a ‘relationship with/to’… there’s a old term for this, one that predates the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers,  called ‘getting Ed Sullivaned’. The origin being how, as a young clark, I would watch the Ed Sullivan Show* and, the culture being barely out of the vaudeville era, there would be acrobatic acts and plate juggler guys. These would be people who’s mission in life was to get these, like, flexible poles, stand them on end, put a dinner plate on the top end, and make them spin. The goal was to get as many spinning as possible…. wait, what the hell am I doing, let me go youtube it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhoos1oY404?list=PL4F4AEC6CDC823498

… hey, come on!  it was the 60s in our parents living room watching on a black and white tv.

In any event, the phrase ‘Ed Sullivaned’ comes from the feeling I would get when the juggler messed up and dropped something. I would feel totally, honestly, look-around-and-hope-no-one-was-looking-at-me-for-an-explanation  guilty/embarrassed.  Sort of projectile empathy.  Anyway, eventually  the phrase came to be associate with the experience of guilt on behalf of another person.

….time to go, work is calling like: ‘a something-something-hooker-something from the other room, while I try to explain to friends how this is not really the real me‘… everyone feels like that at one time or another? right?

 

* early 60’s television show, actually a variety show hosted by a guy who looked like Richard Nixon and he was ‘the venue’ for the first major appearances of performers in the nascent pop music era… Elvis, the Beatles, George Carlin…any entertainer you might enjoy who is more than 50 years old?  probably appeared on Ed Sullivan.

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E -the Wakefield Doctrine- ‘the Everything Rule’

April 6, 2015 By

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

The-Breakfast-Club-1985-001

easily one of the most challenging aspects of the Wakefield Doctrine, the ‘everything Rule’ lies at the very heart of our view of personality types.  Lets remind ourselfs how the Wakefield Doctrine views ‘personality types.

the Wakefield Doctrine maintains that we are born with the potential to experience the world as one of three characteristic personal realities (aka worldviews) and, at an early age we find ourselves in one (our predominant worldview).
A three year old confronting a world in which life is a constant (and beautiful) struggle, his/her very reality demands quick reactions and constant alertness,  the child’s relationship to the world is that of the predator. Everyday life is both a challenge and a celebration, the child learns that the only way to cope with the world is to remain ever in the moment …alive, un-distracted by the abstract, eschewing the internal world of self-questioning and introspection, thriving in the concrete and objective world.  For this child-soon-to-be-an-adolescent-then-adult, life is simple:  eat, sleep, play, hunt. This child will grow up with what we call the scottian personality type. ( Of course, the ‘other two worldviews’, the children living in and contending with those realities will develop the social styles, the coping strategies, the compensations that reflect the reality of the Outsider/clark and the Herd Members/rogers).  The Wakefield Doctrine does not really concern itself with favorite colors, preferences in food, most desired mates… all we need to know is, ‘how does that person relate themselves to the world around them?’

the (three) personality types of the Wakefield Doctrine represent the (individual’s) best effort to cope with the world, as they experience it. The reality of the three worldviews is essential to understanding and effectively using the Wakefield Doctrine as a tool to better understanding the people in our lives.

Ok, so you’ve learned the characteristics of the three worldviews sufficiently enough to allow you to identify the predominant worldview of the people you know and encounter everyday: the girl at the supermarket with the streak of purple in her hair, the boy who sits behind you in History class who always says something that makes you laugh (but no one else seems to hear him), the guy at the gas station with the odd, pressed-lip-smile, the husband who traces outlines of the tools on the pegboard in his workshop, the daughter who is so pretty but insists on spoiling a perfectly good outfit with such odd accessories, the nephew who is so intelligent and yet is getting straight ‘Cs’, the wife who is so sexy and while you’re glad everyone at every social occasion compliments you, sometimes you feel left out.   All these people you can now recognize as being clarks and scotts and rogers.  It’s tempting to think,  ‘My cousin is a carpenter and he’s a wild man I wonder if being a carpenter is a scottian job?’  or maybe, you reflect on last Summer and recall, ‘everyone was so excited about the family vacation, except my daughter, who seemed to be going out of her way to express her indifference, could that be a clark thing?”

‘the everything Rule’ states that: ‘everyone does everything, at one time or another’  

The Rules establishes two things:

  1. (it serves to) remind us that anyone can be a firefighter or a policeman, an accountant or a groundskeeper or a librarian, a physician or a chef
  2. (insists that) it’s incumbent upon us to put ourselves in the worldview of the person we are (trying) to understand and see what it means to be: a cop or a firefighter, a stay-at-home-mom or an insurance adjuster,  from the other person’s perspective, from within their worldview (not ours).

While we all know that scotts have a certain natural…. enthusiasm for an occupation like law enforcement and, therefore tend to excel at it, (what’s not to like for a scott?!!  chase people! drive cars really fast while making a lot of noise… shooting off guns and capturing people (yeah, handcuffs too!)…it’s easy to see why our scottian brothers and sisters like the work), there are very successful clarks and rogers in this line of work. It’s just that for a clark, while the excitement is attractive, they will see their role as being one to protect the innocent, to right wrongs. As too, our rogerian friends who would be cops, they would experience the job as a chance to maintain the Law (and what roger wouldn’t totally love that idea?).

So the everything Rule is there to remind us that when we seek to understand another person, the key is to see the world as they are experiencing it. So when your child come to you and says, “Mom!! Mom!! Tomorrow in school we have Career Day and we’re supposed to pick one thing that we think we should be good at and I signed up,   (for)Librarian!!!  (for) Firefighter!! (for) Ruiner-of-many-a-man’s-life!!! (for) brain surgeon!!”

So that’s ‘the everything Rule’.  (And this Rule applies to everything, not just jobs.  It applies to feelings and ambitions, goals and obsessions, passion and depression.  (yes, even something as subjective as ‘depression’ is amenable to better understanding through application of ‘the everything Rule’!  Simple:  understand the person’s worldview, put yourself in that worldview…what is ‘depression’ in that reality?  And it is different… that I guarantee. And it is difficult to achieve, this perspective…that I also guarantee. But the whole idea of the Wakefield Doctrine is to become able to see the world as the other person is experiencing it.)

(…. I knew you’d think that!)

 

 

 

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D -the Wakefield Doctrine- Doctrine (….I sure am grateful that I named it that!)

April 4, 2015 By

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

images

Ever wonder where the name, ‘the Wakefield Doctrine’ comes from? Well, I’m grateful for your interest1! It’s a fairly interesting story, in that it came about as a by-product of my decision to start this blog. Up until that moment, (in 2009), I was happy calling this insight into human behavior, ‘the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers’. How did that name come about? My! we’re just full of set-up questions this morning, aren’t we? Well, we can do this set up in one of two ways:

  1. ‘I can utter the very time-honored and respected phrase, “well, gather ’round and I’ll tell how ‘the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers’ came to be”  (or)
  2. we could cue some wavy lines and (an) increasing reverb (with a touch of echo) and find ourselfs in Pawtucket RI in 1981 (or thereabouts)

(man! I really hope that came out funnier to you than it did to me, …after 20 minutes of searching youtude. plus the fact that, from my early impressions of the demographic of the ‘Can’t-You’See’ April Blog Challenge, most visiting readers were about 4 years old when the Wayne’s World franchise was at it’s peak… oh well, too late now)

The ‘eureka moment’ of ‘the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers’:

In the early 1980’s, Scott (the progenitor scott) worked at a music store in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He was the only full time salesman and (also) ran the store’s repair department. Not limited to repairing musical instruments, the store provided repair services for a wide range of electronic equipment, including  tape recorders and other audio equipment.

One day I happened to stop by the store to visit scott while he worked. While there, a young man walked into the store, came directly to the ‘repair department’ where scott and I were talking and placed on the counter what was known as a  ‘duel cassette recorder’  (A device with the capacity to record two cassette cartridges at once. Often used to copy the contents of one cassette to another, what we would call today, making a back up. The controls on this ‘dubbing recorder’ were two sets of the normal tape recorder controls: Volume, Treble and Bass. It was different from a single cassette recorder in that it had a Master Volume control dial, which, as the name implies controlled the overall sound output of the device.) The tape recorder that the customer placed on the counter appeared to be new and had no signs of damage or abuse. I stepped back and Scott looked up and said, ‘What can we do for you’?   The customer said to  Scott, “this thing is brand new, it worked for a couple of days, then it stopped working entirely, I can’t figure out what is wrong”.

Scott looked at the device briefly, then without saying a word, reached under the counter, brought out a roll of electrical tape, and tearing off a 2 inch piece of tape, taped over the Master Volume control (after returning the dial to it’s highest setting). Scott then slid the device back over the counter and said, “ There, its all right now”

The customer asked to plug in the recorder, took a cassette from his pocket, tried the recorder, and ran it through it’s paces. After proving to himself that the broken tape recorder that he brought into the store now worked like new, he  thanked Scott and walked out of the store,  a totally satisfied customer.

Boy, am I grateful for that particular trip to the lovely city of Pawtucket2!

So that’s the source of the insight that the Wakefield Doctrine is built upon. Funny about that, I’ve told this story to a lot of people and a certain percentage of people will say, ‘and you’ve spent, what, 30 years working on a personality theory on the basis of a chance observation in a second-rate music store?’ and I say, ‘yes, yes I have’.

….the name, Wakefield Doctrine?  ah! now we get contemporary…. in 2009 I was on my weekly Saturday night drive…. no, lets watch instead!

(this being Saturday, there is the TToT to get up here,  as well as the above D letter. Seeing how we already have two items (clever how I snuck them into the post in, like, footnotes (?feetnotes?)… no?

3) I am grateful for my dog, Una

4) I am grateful for the desk, without which I would be typing with only one hand, which would make this process much more time intensive (and balance-intensive)

5) I am grateful for my work which involves a lot of driving

6) …in my audi

7) lol…. ok, can’t keep it up  so I’ll attempt to complete my list without trying for the D thing…. (hey, funny thing, over the previous 5 days leading up to the blog challenge, I was creating draft posts with titles as a word for the corresponding letter (of the alphabet) occurred to me… well, imagine my surprise this morning when I opened up the Doctrine dashboard and saw ‘D’yanne  …. I’m sure I must have had something in mind as to how I would relate the Doctrine to Dyanne… not quite sure now, but for some reason, I get a visual of Toto being put in a wicker basket and being taken by Margaret Hamilton! go figure

8) thanks to Lizzi and Jen for their support and encouragement in this first week of the April Herd Blog Challenge!

9) (if they really wanted to encourage me, they would find out the name of that new GV…. damn!)

10) 1.3  binyons…. 1.3!

Ten Things of Thankful

 

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1) … I know, you’re welcome!*

2) to the north of Providence (the capital city of Rhode Island), Pawtucket is famous for it’s minor league baseball team, the Pawtucket Red Sox, and, of course it’s Rhymistically-eponymous value in writers of limericks, the world over

* yeah, you ever have an idea and not write it out immediately and when you come back to it, you do not have a clue…or worse, you remember what you thought you would do and it seems kinda stupid…. well, like that  lol

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‘C’ -the Wakefield Doctrine- clark(s) (…and the world out there*)

April 3, 2015 By

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

Pulp-O-Mizer_Cover_Image

clarks are the ‘personality’ type that is the result of a child growing and developing in the worldview (personal reality) of ‘the Outsider’

the Wakefield Doctrine maintains that we, all of us, are heir to three characteristic worldviews, the world of the Outsider/clarks, the reality of the Predator/scotts and the life of the Herd Member/rogers. At a very early age, (for reasons not yet understood), we find ourselves living in one of these three personal realities and develop the coping strategies, social skills and other behavioral nuances appropriate to the world as we are experiencing it.  The character/style/tone of our behavior makes sense, given the reality we are experiencing.

clarks are: creative and subtle, socially immature and needy, independent and other-wordly. (sometimes you’ll hear people say, “oh, I’m so shy! and such an introvert, what a clark you must think I am!” and the astute follower of the Doctrine will smile, (in a kindly and tolerant way), and think, “what a crock. two exclamations in your little statement and you want me to believe you’re a clark. sorry. you have disqualified yourself”)**

Famous clarks: Diane Keaton, Richard Linklater, David Duchovny,  Flo, Kristen Stewart, Robert DiNiro, Cynthia Calhoun, Bill Nye, Bob Newhart, Alton Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Tilda Swinton (what a couple they would make!), Dorothy Gale, Daphne (the cartoon one, not the scottian one), Steven Wright, Jane Foster, Lizzi Rogers, Madame Curie, Joan de Arc

clarks:

curious, easily bored, interested in anything that poses a question, insatiable people-watcher, friendly when not feeling threaten, confident when discussing ideas, totally tropistic for any information, however useless and obscure, in the hope that it will provide an insight into how they should feel, aggressive when dealing with ideas, passive when dealing with real people, (except friends…who they value more than anything), fearful, un-afraid (not the contradiction it would appear to be), the hardest workers you could ever under-pay and self-less to an extreme, egotistical beyond imagining and willing to do anything for a chance to be accepted, except be themselves.  

clarks believe (consciously or otherwise) that they are Outsiders because they lack something, a thing that everyone else clearly is in possession of, (clarks) see no other avenue than to un-cover every rock in the world in the hopes that (this knowledge) is there… that with enough information, they will become Real People.

clarks think.

(oh yeah. New Readers? Visitors from the Azzuz April Blogathon Challenge???  The Wakefield Doctrine maintains that while everyone is of one, and only one, worldview (aka predominant worldview), we all retain the potential to experience the world as do ‘the other two’  so if you’re thinking, ‘damn! this was interesting, but I seem to me a mix of 2’  perfectly ‘normal’. Not to worry. It’s only your secondary or tertiary aspect.)

 *************

* there is one, interesting way to determine if a person is a clark, although it’s a little tricky to set up.  Of the three world views, it is only that clarks who will, upon waking in the morning, sit for a moment and reflect on their up-coming day and consider that everything (everything! people, places and things) as ‘being out there’.
Let me take this opportunity to say this,  a great deal of what we do and learn and infer about the people in our lives relies on our ability to observe the reactions and responses of the other person. No, I don’t mean the big gross reactions,  “What the HELL!!! /ooh baby/ ayiiee”  No, I mean the tiny little clues.

Example: one day I was in my office and the only other person there was a clark. As I walked by, she expressed a bit of particularly heartfelt frustration with the computer she was using, including the statement, “this is one of those days when the world refuses to make sense“.  As she spoke to me of the things in her day that were not coming out the way they always did, I watched her eyes. I noticed that at certain times she was clearly focused on something that was not in the same real estate office that we were in, but, more significantly, I caught her glancing at me whenever she made what she thought might be perceived as an outrageous statement, “I know I left that file on my desk, I never left the room, but when I turned around, it was gone!” (glance).  I decided to share some of my own experiences (a fairly common one among clarks), of ‘getting lost in the world’. I told her about how, just the other day, while driving down a road that I drive every single day, I looked up and did not know where on earth I was… it lasted only for a second, just long enough to get that, twisting-of-the-stomach feeling.
As I spoke, I watched her eyes and, when I got to the climax of the story, (where I made it abundantly clear that I don’t consider it overly abnormal to ‘get lost in the world’)… I could see her pupils dilate. Nothing overt. Nothing a casual participant in the conversation would have had any cause to notice. But there was recognition in her eyes. And then it was gone and the story ended. (and no, I did not relate the principles of the Wakefield Doctrine.)

** yeah, sort of an emotional shibboleth

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B -the Wakefield Doctrine- Behavior

April 2, 2015 By

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

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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’

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