Do you remember "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", the cartoon? And the sweet, simple and stupid-seeming dwarf? His name was "Dopey". He was chosen as the metaphor/title for this script because it fits so well. For those who have been programmed in this manner by whatever means are very much like the lovable little dwarf -- innocent, down-to-earth and easily overwhelmed, so that they need a "prosthetic environment" to function, ranging from individualized instruction to "crib-sheets" to special routines to specialized equipment to support system intimates to full-fledged institutionalization.
HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY?
This is a situation where the individual is under-expected, over-protected and confidence- and competence-undermined to such a degree that they end up feeling that they don't have what it takes to make it. There is a whole lot of do-for and "s/he can't" messaging and expectations going down. The result is that in effect, the individual ends up never learning how to cope effectively on their own, and they then need specialized support systems for the rest of their life if intervention doesn't occur.
The motivations on the part of the family that lead to this pattern of treatment of the individual range from reactions to frailty to being told there is no hope for the individual (as in "Down's syndrome") to explanation-seeking to account for the individual's deviance to outright disguised hatred and simultaneous emotional dependency on the individual. The all-too-frequent occasion for this to happen is the "minimal brain dysfunction" label applied by the "whitecoats", telling the individual in effect that they are going to be a functional vegetable for the rest of their life.
A more ambiguous case is real retardation, in the organic sense, but even here, it is being clearly found that the brain and the so-called "retard" are capable of much more than they show. There was a vivid example of this early in my career. A boy who had an IQ of 60 and who was so out of it that he ate cloth napkins and walked into walls came to our agency for live-in treatment. He had had massive multiple seizures so he had had an operation to excise the affected brain area, leaving a gigantic "Frankenstein" scar, which the parents made sure showed by keeping him in a quarter inch crew cut.
But we found that he was actually engaging in a tremendous amount of "studied incompetent care-coercing" ("SICC"), arising out of profound competence-anxiety greatly aided and abetted by the way his parents were treating him. We assessed him carefully and then put him on a program of demanding a routine performance one step below what he was putting out all the time. That of course immediately led to the disappearance of both this performance and the one above it that he had been routinely performing.
But we held to our guns on a simple school task, requiring him to complete it before anything else could commence. It took 14 hours of workers sitting with him, meals brought, a makeshift bed on the floor of the in-house classroom, etc., before he finally copped to his ability after a massive and rather aggressive fight all through that time. His worker picked him up onto his shoulders and carried him out to a hero's welcome. The next "competence-battle" lasted 2 hours, the next, 15 minutes. A year later, he left the program with an IQ of 120, and he went on to achieve a master's degree.
Now clearly, not every "retard" can do this, but nevertheless, the thing that marks the learning history of the "dopey" is that their environment is convinced that they can't do it, and they end up REALLY convinced they can't -- and then they proceed to prove it in spades, out of the profound competence-anxiety and demand-deflecting motivation that results from such an experience.
The typical situation for the generation of a "dopey" involves a person who is abandoned, insufficiently nurtured and unable to reach out because no one was there or responsive, for whatever reason. Something was greatly awry in their early formative period, and they did not get the support, interaction and involvement they needed, resulting in delayed development of some of the "vital signs" of growth. That, in turn, sets off the chain of events that result in their encountering the "broken brain" treatment in response to their developmental delays and arising from the family system difficulties that precipitated the problem in the first place. And that, in turn, sets off the set of processes described above that precipitate and maintain the "dopey" pattern.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
Their experiential history results in massive cope-ability anxiety, and their approach becomes, "I can't do it, and if you try to make me, I'll make you sorry you ever tried!". The terror of having to take on the requirements of the world is just too much for them to handle, and each demand becomes a thoroughly demoralizing message that they will be forced to try to accomplish the impossible with nothing. They respond to novelty and growth-induction with massive horror and heel-digging, withdrawal, shut-down and rage.
It could be said that their entire life revolves around the issue of how to find a way to get the environment to turn off its impossible demands and to come out with some sort of "prosthetic resource" to assist them in coping with the requirements of living and to garner at least their basic needs. And they rarely get much beyond the bare basics in terms of their ambitions and manifestations. They do indeed tend to operate at less than normal levels of functioning. They are just plain too scared to try.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
Their experiential history results in the individual's having severe abandonment-anxiety, competence-anxiety and cope-ability anxiety, which in turn leads to a passive, low energy, and egregious neediness. They hold on to whatever meager resources they encounter for dear life, and they are extremely resistant to change. They feel deeply deprived and inundated with unfulfilled needs. They also become resentful, spiteful, greedy, sympathy-seeking pseudo-sad, "alum-trip" draining, and full of irrelevant, incompetent and weird verbiage, all designed to coerce the environment to take care of them because they "can't". "Do it for me!", "I'm helpless." and "I can't do it." are their whole approach.
They have developed a systematic expectation- and responsibility-deflecting process involving massive studied incompetence, intense learning-resistance and severe requirement-punishment. Efforts to teach or require of them turn into massive power struggles in which the "dopey" can outwait, go to further extremes than their care-takers can, and ingeniously frustrate to the point of forced capitulation almost every time.
"Dopeys" are not responsive to the normal levels of input. You have to "hit them with a 2 x 4" to get things through their pervasive and profound resistance. They are also slow and gross in their tracking and pacing, with the result that they go significantly out of synch with whatever is going on wherever they are, and it just becomes too much hassle to have them along. So they end up more and more being required to do less and less. And this reinforces and validates their self-estimation, and a viscous cycle or even a downward spiral results.
In effect, then, they become first-rate requirement-deflectors and self-scarers, and they refuse to be responsible for themselves in any area where they feel threatened or that is new to them. Instead, they either settle for a minimalist lifestyle or they find ever more clever, cunning and conning ways to get the environment to "do-for" for them. But with each "success" and "settle-for", they end up more and more entrenched in their severely under-performing and restricted manifestation, with its associated despair, rage and depression.
To make matters worse, there is the problem of the "dopey" parent. What happens here is that they put their children in a bind of having to try to rear themselves and their parent(s) while being "accountable to idiots". It has the effect of keeping the kids around the old homestead, often in a total slavery entrapment. Or conversely, they pass it on to the kids, who develop a self-estimation and lifestyle similar to their parent(s).
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
Intervention involves assessing what the individual is willing to do routinely on their own in their behavioral output in the way of competence level in some area of self-responsibility. Select a trivial piece of this area as your "tiny target", such as putting their shoes on, and demand one step LESS competent than that, such as pulling on their socks. This new "demand" to do what is below their routine level of competence is accompanied by the promise of a heavy jolt of potent reward contingent upon compliance. This process announces the beginning of the "great show-down", because it puts the individual on notice that "the jig is up" and they are going to be required to become more and more competent.
Now this process of guaranteeing a powerful joy experience against a pittance of competence-anxiety about the required performance would seemingly be a "shoe-in". But it's not -- not by any means. Because it is the signal that they are going to be asked to learn and perform and be self-responsible, all of which terrify the hell out of them. So it activates a massive demand-paranoia and implication-freak out of the first magnitude.
For this reason, the "dopey's" reaction will be to drop to an even lower level of performance in the area, so that for instance, they now "can't unroll their socks". But it is not possible to suppress a strongly habitual response very long, and sooner or later they will end up being forced to "take the plunge" and own that bit of competence they already have (getting the socks on), with a well-deserved giant pay-off for their enormous risk. After all, it will now be EXPECTED of them forever.
When they start putting out this demanded risk and response routinely, you then raise the expectation to the next step up, the formerly readily performed skill, in this example, putting their shoes on. The reward contingency for getting the socks on is removed and it is now placed on putting their shoes on. When this is "mastered", then raise the expectation to the first truly new requirement, such as tying their own shoelaces.
You then continue in this manner up the "success ladder" (via very small, simple and well-supported steps) until they "get it" that they CAN and DO LEARN. When the "dopey" finds out that they can learn, everything becomes potentially overcome-able and ultimately master-able. They will then start spurting ahead in a burst of joyful learning and growing self-respect, and the size of the step increments and the demands increase progressively, eventually reaching the size of "seven league boots". They can then be phased on to routine living, with occasional assists, "booster shots in the arm" and special programs for particularly difficult or scary new undertakings.
What in effect happens here is that the individual undergoes a radical transformation of their self-concept and their experience of what is possible for them. It totally turns them around and turns them on. Now of course, the process has to be adapted to the needs of particular individuals in particular situations, but the general model will work to bring the individual to at least their level of minimal performance and productivity capability every time. By the way, appropriate adaptations can also be applied to more functional individuals who have "Swiss cheese holes" in their functioning capabilities or who have severe learning phobias in particular areas.
The other thing the "success ladder" intervention does is to "bridge the gaping gap" between them and other people so that they can be reached to teach. It generates a true trust reaction of their environment for the first time in their life, based on real life experience. And this, in turn, makes the more inherently resourced ones such as old souls and pseudo-retards like the example given earlier able to reach out and teach some one very effectively indeed, because they REMEMBER how it was.
WHAT IS THEIR PUROSE?
Out of this process comes a person who has, in effect, a change in their destiny. They have been transformed in terms of what is possible for them. It therefore makes them a "self-made person" and a "self-teacher" who now fills in their own blanks and who is making it in the world. And for higher level people, they become an intensely compassionate and maximally motivating teacher of others who need their kind of assistance.
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