When Behavioral Non-Compliance Leads to Insanity or Death: Escaping the Ronalds of The World…
I’m Mary. In June of 1961 I was born inside a harsh cult community and forced to unquestioningly serve an all powerful leader named Ronald.
Ronald liked me because I was one of the best at anticipating and meeting his needs. He also favored petite brunettes, which I happened to be, because he himself was so short. He disliked my little brother who had cognitive deficits.
My brother, Joseph, couldn’t think fast enough to anticipate Ronald’s needs, so he was often designated for punishments. He was sentenced to death at age 10. I did not grieve until years later and will tell you why in a bit.
Regardless of how much Ronald liked or disliked us, if we didn’t behave how he expected, we were given 5 chances to improve. We were given ten lashes after our first behavioral infraction; ten were added for every subsequent infraction. After the 5th, we were sentenced to death.
We were never taught or even told how to achieve expected behaviors. We were simply expected to read and respond accurately to Ronald’s body language and facial expressions. We were expected to empathize with him, but only him.
It became obvious to me after a while, those who survived were those with similar thinking and learning styles to Ronald. All others earned themselves a death sentence or went insane. Insanity would also earn you a death sentence.
About 20% of our population went insane each year. The stress of reading and responding appropriately to Ronald’s needs is brutally mentally taxing for everyone. But for those with different thinking/learning styles than Ronald, it was unbearable. They were wrecked with excruciating amounts of anxiety about being punished, tortured, and/or sentenced to death by hanging for incorrectly anticipating Ronald’s needs. They knew they didn’t have the cognitive ability to think like Ronald and the constant threat of torture or death for missteps made many of them go insane.
Needless to say, the stakes for behavioral compliance were high! “Comply or Die” is Ronald’s motto. He had it written everywhere on everything.
The reason I am writing is because I finally learned how to read and write after my older brother risked his life to smuggle me to freedom five years ago. He escaped and returns every couple years to free family members. If caught, the torture would be excruciating. He is very brave.
Once free, it took me a full year to reclaim my brain and body for my own personal use because I had no idea my brain and body were personal to me. I had only been taught my brain and body belonged to Ronald. I was taught my nervous system was 100% wired to observe and anticipate Ronald’s needs and desires so it is all I believed my brain and body were capable of doing.
Because I was never allowed to have a need or a desire, I did not have any. I ate when Ronald was hungry, eliminated when Ronald needed to eliminate, slept when he got tired. I thought about what Ronald told me to think about, believed what he told me to believe, did work Ronald told me to do. Every minute of my day was dictated by Ronald’s needs, desires, and goals.
The first time I identified an internal sensation as my actual hunger I danced around for joy. It was like I met myself for the first time.
I didn’t correctly identify a hunger sensation until my 7th day of freedom. It did not occur to me to eat without being told, so by day 7, I was weak and uncomfortable. I would have been brutally beaten had I eaten before Ronald indicated he was hungry, so my hunger cues, like all my internal cues, were wired to respond to Ronald’s hunger only. The notion my internal sensations were cues meant to give me information about my bodily needs never once occurred to me, not even a little bit. I had no idea I even had needs. I firmly believed what I was taught. And I was taught I existed for the sole purpose of fulfilling Ronalds’ needs. I was taught my entire life’s worth hinged upon how well I anticipated and met Ronald’s needs.
When my brother visited me on day 7 of my freedom he said, “Have you eaten? I left lots of food for you.”
“Nobody told me to eat,” I said.
“Aren’t you starving?” my brother asked incredulously.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I am so sorry, my brother said. I forgot it will take a long time for you to reclaim your brain and body so you can identify what your internal sensations mean for you. You only know what they mean in relationship to Ronald’s needs. What sensation do you have inside your body right now?” my brother asked.
“Well, I have kind of a pressure in my stomach and a growliness.”
“Well, sister, that is a hunger pang. It means you are hungry. Remember, you’re free now. You don’t have to worry about anyone else’s hunger but your own. I will call three times a day for the next seven days to remind you to eat. But after that you’ll have to figure it out for yourself.”
When my brother left, I nervously looked about kitchen. So many choices! How would I ever choose? What would Ronald want, I wondered. Let’s see, it’s about noon. Ronald would want a turkey sandwich. That’s what I’ll have.
But the next day at noon after my brother called to remind me to eat, I forgot to consider what Ronald would want because the strawberries looked so delicious to my personal eyes. Only after I ate the strawberries, I became so nervous about being lashed I threw up.
I told my brother when he called to remind me about dinner. He said, “You will have to carefully re-evaluate everything you think and do to be able to make your life personal to you instead of being an extension of Ronald.” My brother said, “It took me one full year to figure out how to stop being an extension of Ronald and to connect the dots between my internal sensations and what they meant for me personally.”
The next morning, before my brother called to remind me to eat breakfast, I felt something in my stomach. Without hesitation I got up and went straight to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. Before the first bite I screamed and ran around like a wild animal. I had nonchalantly identified my first internal sensation and what it meant for me!!! I was hungry!!!! This experience gave me the confidence and insight to continue connecting more dots between internal sensations and what they meant for me!!!
The hardest sensations to identify were fatigue, confusion, and sadness. Actually, who am I kidding. They were all hard to decipher. For a long time I associated fatigue with sadness. One night when my brother had come to visit, he said, “Why do you look so sad tonight?”
I replied, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Every night around 8 pm I feel sad. Sometimes I just sit and cry.”
My brother said, “Oh, that happened to me too when I first got out. You’ll never guess what was making me so sad.”
“What?” I exclaimed.
“Fatigue, plain and simple,” he said. Think about it. If you wake up at 6 am, by 8 o’clock at night your whole body is going to feel tired. I used to be perfectly happy all day then 8 o’clock would roll around and I’d find myself on the couch sinking into despair for no apparent reason. Then one night I was in Sears at 8 pm and a children’s show was on in the TV section. The man on the show declared, “OK, kids, time to get ready for bed. Get your pj’s on and run back for story time. Hurry now. If you stay up too late your body won’t feel very good.”
The lightbulb went off in my brain. My body didn’t feel so good when I became fatigued. My 8 pm sadness was really fatigue. I was mistaking the body cues telling me to get ready for bed as cues telling me to feel sad.
Well the lightbulb went off for me as well when my brother told me his story!
I was so relieved because I’d been associating my fatigue not just with sadness but with character weakness as well. Back at Ronald’s I did not determine my wake and sleep schedule, he did. So when I felt weak after a long day’s work I was taught it was due to my weakness of character. In those days I beat myself up every time I felt fatigue and wished I could be a better person.
Not having to feel ashamed for the feelings fatigue caused in my body was exquisite. I began to love the feeling of getting sleepy. In general I began to I love the feeling of having a body that gave me personal information. Who knew my body belonged to me personally??
In this non-cult life I assumed other people would find me an absurd person for how disconnected I was to my own body. But oddly, I found people just like me everywhere because there were so many power hungry Ronald types everywhere. Ronald types were manipulating people to do their bidding all the time out here.
Most of the power hungry ‘Ronald types’ I observed in the non-cult world were much more passive aggressive at getting people to respond to their needs, wants, and goals than my Ronald was. It made me appreciate the fact my Ronald did not pretend he was controlling everyone’s behaviors for our own good. He made no bones about expecting everyone to exist in relationship to his wants, needs, and goals. He was super clear.
The Ronald types I observed on the outside convinced people to serve them by convincing people they would be fulfilling a higher purpose as well as their own growth and development through their allegiance. What brilliant cons they were!!
My brother supported me for a full year, after which time I was expected to get a job. My brother said I would need a good year to learn how to meet my basic needs by learning how to read my internal cues and what they signified for my brain and body.
My year of getting reacquainted with my own brain and body was sublime. For the first time I delighted in being alive, in my human-ness. For the first time life felt pleasing and interesting. I now cringe at how excruciatingly boring and miserable life was under Ronald.
Soon, my first year of freedom came to an end. I had been assigned to childcare in Ronald’s community, so I applied to be a paraeducator at the school in my new neighborhood. To my delight, I got the job.
But on the first day, two hours in, I found myself hyperventilating in a tiny bathroom stall. The teacher of my assigned classroom was acting just like Ronald. Had I been captured by another cult?
The teacher expected the children to behave according to her expectations. Otherwise they were given a consequence, a punishment was given or a reward was not given. Children didn’t receive lashes or a death sentence, but the effects of forced behavioral compliance were curiously similar to the people in Ronald’s community.
Behavior management made everyone miserable, especially the children with different thinking/learning styles than the teacher. Many of the children became more skittish, anxious, and miserable with each passing day.
You see, like Ronald, the teacher expected the children to exist in relationship to her needs, wants, and goals. But unlike Ronald, the teacher did not make this expectation explicit. This situation was even more messed up than Ronald’s because the children were made to believe they were acting on behalf of their own personal brain and body when they were expected to act on behalf of the teacher’s brain and body.
I did a little research and found according to NAMI, one out of five people each year suffer a mental illness, about 20%, just like in Ronald’s cult. Hmmm, I thought. Is there a correlation between expecting children to exist in relationship to the thinking/learning styles of a teacher, parent, or authority figure and the current rates of mental illness?
My guess is yes. These children are being shaped, just as I was, to associate their internal sensations with the needs and expectations of their authority figures. They will end up to be as internally confused as I was.
I’s so sad to see adults who have grown up like the children in my classroom. They are constantly searching for that one perfect authority figure or ideology they can exist in relationship to because it is all they know. Their idea of freedom is not to make sense of the world around them in the ways that make sense to their brain and body, it is to make sense of the world just like an expert or ideology of their choice does. To my non-cult friends, freedom means being able to choose who or what tells them how to think and behave.
The sad part is, once my friends choose their expert or authority or ideology, they are still plagued with constant anxiety because existing in relationship to the wants, needs, and desires of an authority or ideology is arduous, stressful, and unpleasant. Many of my new friends switch their allegiance constantly, believing their unrelenting unhappiness and anxiety is due to their poor choice of expert authority to follow.
From what I can tell, nobody believes they are capable of thinking for themselves. They are all looking for answers, and purposes, and anything they can find to help them stop feeling inferior or wrong or inadequate while living their human lives. They want to find that special person who can tell them they are OK, adequate, worthy. They are desperate to find the authority who can make their lives feel good to them instead of full of lack because they were not raised to believe they were capable of being a competent, capable, decent, respected, and respectable person on their own of their own accord.
All I know is if my new friends spent one week in Ronald’s community, they would never pledge allegiance to anyone again. They would see how people who want to manage their thinking and behavior are only out for themselves, regardless of how often they say otherwise, or how good a cause or ideology they claim to represent. After a week at Ronald’s people would realize authority based blueprints for organizing human groups is good for getting lots of work done, but only at the expense of all the non-authority members of these groups.
Oh, and about my little brother being killed. One day I saw a little boy who looked like just my brother in the school where I work. He had Autism, which is something I think my little brother had. The little boy had a meltdown when they ran out of his lunch choice. His paraeducator immediately reprimanded him, told him to use his words, and told him he was not going to get a good behavior smiley sticker that day due to his meltdown behaviors. The boy looked utterly defeated. He sat down on the floor, tears rolling down his cheeks, while the para angrily scribbled things down on his behavior chart.
When I saw the sorrow on the little boy who looked like my brother I became physically ill. For the first time I felt grief for the suffering my little brother endured under Ronald. For the first time I mourned his death. I loved my little brother so much, but was not allowed to identify feelings for anyone other than Ronald, thus my delayed grief response.
I decided then and there to start a new school. I will never comment upon a child’s behavior in my school. I will have rules and create order, but never at the expense of the children. I will not demand my students respond or behave in ways I predetermine they should. I will allow my students to exist in relationship to the world around them in the ways that make sense to them, the way all mammals are prepared by evolution to exist. I will never speak to my students in patronizing or controlling ways. We will all be 100% in control of ourselves. Nobody, child or adult, will be allowed to control the responses, behaviors, thoughts, or beliefs of anyone else but themselves.
My school will have rules and it will be structured just like any other school, but the rules will not be enforced using a single variation of behaviorism or applied behavioral analysis. I will not require a child to exist and learn in a way that makes me comfortable. I will instead design teaching methods to allow each of my students to learn in a state of internal comfort and equilibrium.
I don’t know if power imbalanced authority based organizational systems will be replaced by egalitarian systems in my lifetime, but I sure hope so! I shudder to think of all the power hungry Ronalds running around looking for followers to do their bidding…
