Might Makes Right

If you grew up as a healthy child living in a stable home, where things were safe, predictable, and fair, you probably have a worldview that expects safe, fair, and predictable outcomes. But if not….. if you grew up as a refugee or an abused child, for example, you will expect hunger, pain, unfairness, and unpredictability.

Children transform experiences, observations, and feelings into thought patterns. These are reinforced by whatever responses their actions elicit. They come to believe certain things about parents, caregivers, and society-at-large according to what they experience. Their neurological pathways, like stream beds, develop subconsciously into certain emotional, cognitive, and even physiological reactions. The deeper the trauma, the deeper the stream beds. Neurological researchers call these responses autonomic. Theologians refer to them as moral logic. These physiological, emotional, and moral responses gel throughout childhood, entrenching themselves as habits. Healthy children in healthy families eventually learn to question and modify their own behaviors, but unhealthy children do not. In their case, the behavior is more habitual than intentional. They want to behave well, yet they do not.

In our work, we constantly seek to discover effective tools to redirect such deep and misdirected stream beds. We have come to learn that what worked for most of us as children does not work for trauma victims. Rewards and punishments have no real lasting effect, particularly if not packaged with love, safety, and sensibility, the elements of a healthy childhood. If one has no reasonable expectation for hope or fairness (no moral logic), there is no motivation for reasonable behavior, no integration of any long-term values, no capacity to self-regulate emotions. So at Wedgwood, we do our best to create safe spaces, to act predictably, to build an expectation of gentleness and forgiveness, to repeat promises that we intend to “prosper and not to harm”.

To be honest, we did not figure this all out. It was modeled for us. Way back in time, God decided that this lesson was too important for words alone. It required presence. So he decided to leave a very comfortable place, take on a body, and live among us. And when he did, he modeled gentle responses, infinite forgiveness, patient and collaborative teaching methods. Wherever he went he created a safe space for good decision making, knowing that values must be freely chosen if they were to have any relational validity. Some would argue that it got him nowhere. The world is still a mess and all that gentleness and forgiveness ended in his own crucifixion. Those with the “power” laughed at such a loser. Love your enemies? Become like a child? Meekness is a weakness. MIGHT MAKES RIGHT!

But wait… He did manage to show us what God values, how God thinks and acts, how we are to raise our children, what God wants from us. And by the way, he only stayed dead for about 36 hours, proving once-and-for-all who really holds the power…and who gets to define might and right! There is a connectedness to life and humanity after all. We will continue to teach our staff and our children and anyone who will listen: RIGHT MAKES MIGHT!