A Mother tells her fidgety child: Don't pull my sari. The child stop pulling the sari and promptly begins rattling the door. ‘Stop rattling the door. Can't you stop fidgeting and sit still!’ The child stops rattling the door, sits quietly kicking his feet and sucking his thumbs.
This is what we do repeatedly to children, to each other, and to one's own self. ‘Don't do it!’ Never do we say what exactly is to be done.
The human body, its brain, is a complex machine designed to do things. “Do not rattle doors’ leaves the machine without instruction as to what it should do. So it begins scanning to find out what it should do and as each trial leads to an increasingly screaming voice shouting ‘NO!’, it becomes more and more chaotic.
 |
| Matthew Freeman, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrf/2190813746 |
Instead of saying, ‘Don't suck your thumbs!’ the child was clearly, politely requested to please get a glass of water, or asked to bring the packet of biscuits, the child may or may not obey at once, thanks to your systematic induction of what you call negativism, but at least the nervous system knows what exactly it is disregarding.
This epidemic of negative instruction, comment and criticism has become the pernicious habit with society: everyone knows what is wrong with everyone, the wife, the son, the office, the government, the UNO and so on. But no one has actually a clear thought formation of what exactly should be done by the ‘others’ and what exactly he himself is doing for the objective, if at all positively defined.
It is good to remember that the nervous system has no negative signals - all signals that enter it have a positive effect on it, the external result may be negative from a particular angle.
A positive specific instruction is more helpful in the long run.
***
Posts
