Healing and empowering relationships

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me"
( From Tommy, the rock opera, by The Who)

A concept that keeps coming up in looking at how relationships take shape and keep their shape as they are recreated daily is that of active vision.

This really needs a term of its own, so maybe I'll call it proactive-vision.

What is involved is a kind of looking and seeing people that is not passive, not like the way a television camera looks. It is a kind of looking that active reaches out and shapes the person or thing that is being "viewed", and helps coax or even force that "external" state into a stable viewable state.

I think you need something like Quantum Mechanics, or advanced database concepts to find scientific examples of this on other scales. In quantum mechanics, for example an electron doesn't really "have" a shape -- it has an infinity of possible shapes and it swims happily in that sea of possibilities UNTIL some crass and cruel OBSERVER comes along and, by the very act of observing, FORCES it to resolve itself into one particular shape. What is unmentioned is that the forcing has a persistent after effect, and now the electron has been forced into that shape even after the observer waltzes away to force some other electron into a single shape.

Photons, or bits of light, also have this kind of behavior -- they can enter an atom and be TENTATIVELY absorbed by the electron shell of the atom, where they sit for a while and see how that goes. If they don't like it there, they can EXIT again, exactly UNDOING what they did on entering so that the final state of the atom is exactly as if the photon was never there at all. (You can do the same thing in advanced databases -- you can execute a transaction that attempts to update all necessary tables, and, if it fails, it automatically is "rolled back" in such a way that it, effectively, never really happened.)

In other words, on at least some scales and some instances, Life or Nature has an amazing ability to try out a billion things at once, see which ones it wants to keep, and then UNdo the (billion minus one) that didn't work out as if they had never happened in the first place. They don't need to be "killed", which would leave a billion dead bodies around, they simply are UN-happened away, to coin a phrase. They are magically made to never have been here in the first place. It is and ASTOUNDINGLY efficient use of resources and, aside from some side effects, is 100% undetectable by most scientific means, because, hey, how can you detect something that never happened in the first place.

It is as if life has a "before you begin" page (one of my pet peeves) that comes in, looks around, goes "Nahh, I guess not", and leaves before it begins, taking the packaging and even the memory of the event with it as it goes, and leaving no hole behind.

Anyway, the point is that PEOPLE seem to have an equivalent sort of affair. By simply sitting and LISTENING to a person, or by LOOKING at them, as the intrusive OBSERVER, you are actually CAUSING their billions of possible states to take shape. WORSE, or BETTER, your framework for vision and your very expectations of WHAT you EXPECT to see actually has an impact in tweaking, nudging, or even FORCING that person into one of the shapes that you EXPECT to see, where they are now stuck, even if they were not there and didn't want to be there in the first place.

OBSERVATION IS INTRUSIVE. There is no such thing as "passive" observation of electrons, nor, I think, of people. Much, or even MOST of what the observer SEES was brought to the scene by the observer, not the observed person.

In other terms, life is just chock FULL of self-fulfilling expectations when it comes to what you see. Especially in situations where someone with higher authority is doing the "looking", this can be a very powerful, even determining, shaping effect.

When Professor Lev ? from Harvard was here giving a talk on Theory X (old style hierarchy) versus Theory Y (new style collaborative) teams, he gave an example where someone asked him, "Well, which is it, are people basically theory X or theory Y?" and his answer was "Yes"...
meaning, your staff or team or employees or children or students are WHATEVER you FORCE THEM or EMPOWER THEM to be by your own expectations and the way you "LOOK" at them.

If you expect them to be unruly, selfish, lazy trouble-makers, and you SEE that in them, and you keep SEEING it and persist it in your own head and mind, you will soon see much more of it because it will embody itself in the real world, and they will BECOME that way. On the other hand, if you expect them to be organized, efficient, helpful, reliable people , and you SEE traces of that and keep on persisting THAT vision of them in your mind, they will become THAT way.

Either one is a self-fulfilling PERCEPTION. This is real. This actually happens.

Reproducible research studies show that, in school, if teachers EXPECT a student to be a good student, odds are very high he or she will turn into one; and if teachers EXPECT a studentn to be bad or a trouble-maker, odds are also very high he or she will turn into one. Again, here is a very strong argument that all forms of prejudice and racism are, in fact, in themselves a kind of hate-crime, causing continual damage to the target group, and effectively FORCING The target group towards or into the very behaviors that are detested.

I recall once, in freshman Chemistry at Cornell, a teaching assistant got it into his head that I had cheated on an exam. He noted that I had simply written down the answer to a problem with no intermediate steps shown. When I explained to him that I had use the technique shown in the book to get the answer, it became apparent that he had not read the book, and further, that he was unwilling to consider the concept that he was wrong and that I was NOT a cheater. He left the meeting with words like "You got away with it this time, but I have my eye on you, and I'll GET you before the term is done!"

That single framework destroyed the rest of the course for me. I had a terrible time. I got migrane headaches when I even thought about going to class and facing him. I felt a tremendous URGE to cheat on exams, even though I don't do that, just because I was being TREATED that way so I might as well behave that way. It was a startlingly strong impulse.
At the end of the course, I literally tore my textbook into small pieces and threw it in the dumpster, along with any desire to EVER take another chemistry course again, EVER. It reshaped my life.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be black in a city where every time you walk into a store, you are followed by security guards who expect you to be shoplifting because you are obviously a thief because you are "one of those people." I can imagine the rage of President Obama's friend when the police forced their way into his house and arrested him because the neighbor reported that an obvious intruder had gone into the house. This is not a passive act, to be continually treated as a criminal or as an enemy of the rich-white-man's-system. If we do it long enough, we can FORCE people into that identity, good people who would never have gone there if not forced to by our prejudiced "observation".

The UPSIDE is that we can similarly EXPECT people to deliver their very best in such a way that we EMPOWER them to do so, and release their latent energy to do so.

Every day, in every observation, in every glance, we challenge or reaffirm our own mental model of other people and apply a persistent pressure on them for them to become the way we think they are.

It's an amazing power we hold.

We need to learn to use it wisely.

We need to expect the other people in our lives to use it wisely too, and close the loop, so that we raise each other up, each day, in a thousand small ways, instead of cutting each other down each day in a thousand small ways.

People become what you SEE them as being. TEAMS become what you SEE Them as being.

And other cultures and nations become what you SEE them as being. If you SEE them as being threats to you, your continued perception of them that way and reaction to them that way draws energy into the universe in such a way that it TURNS them INTO that threat, where you can now feel 100% justified and say, "See, they are bad people, they are troublemakers and worse, they are terrorists, they are trying to kill us, so we should kill them first!"

The totally surprising fact is that, had you seen them as being friends from the start, it is very likely that they would have turned out to be friends.

You, we, all of us, have an AMAZING power to RESHAPE the world around us by the simple act of persistent perception.

This is one reason, for example why holding onto a grudge for past behavior is a terrible thing to do -- it FORCES the person you are mad at to STAY that way, even if they want to change.

I thought the song from the rock-opera Tommy that I headed this piece with was relevant.
"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me" are part of the words of one song in that opera.

We do this every day -- except all too often it's "see me, feel me, touch me, injure me". So often in fact, that, despite the pain of isolation and loneliness, many people today simply want to stay apart from others so they are not damaged MORE by poor expectations and looks that kill.

And, yes, looks can kill. Or heal.

It's something we need to become much more aware of, and literate in managing.


In light of this effect, it's interesting to ponder the impact on President Obama to have received the Noble Peace Prize. Suddenly he has to be aware that the world outside the USA views him in a certain way.

Another implication of this effect has to do with the way we treat people in authority over us, including government officials and corporate managers and officers. If the majority of people treat someone in authority as if they are a self-interested idiot and crook, there are very good odds that the person will turn out to fulfill those expectations.

On the other hand, to treat a boss as a wise person when they are an exploitive fool is not a winning move, nor is it wise on the boss's part to treat staff as if they are competent and caring if they are incompetent and amoral.

These transitions from BAD to GOOD sides of both the boss AND the staff need to occur together. The feedback loops overlap and generate a process that will run to completion, but doesn't care whether it runs UPWARDS, generating greatness on both sides, or runs DOWNWARDS, generating pettiness on both sides.

THE REALLY tricky problem, the one I'm trying to crack using virtual reality, is getting a boss+team that has latched into the DOWN side to transition out of that state and upwards into the UPSIDE state.

The same math applies whether it is a couple trying to fix their relationship, or a workteam trying to fix their working relationships, or a nation and culture trying to fix its working relationships with other nations and cultures.

Downside (bad) states are NOT a "fact of life" -- they persist only because we actively participate in persisting them. THAT is the great hope. They are ACTIVE BEINGS, so there are no constants -- they need to be created and recreated every single new day. The very same people can just as well be latched UPWARDS into a mutually supportive state as latched DOWNWARDS into a mutually destructive state.

This is the logjam we need to get an adequate social mechanism to fix, on a case-by-case basis, whether through therapy or "healing circles" on a domestic relationship level, or on a work-team/boss level within a company.

The downside shape simply BLEEDS wealth and opportunity costs. Companies that begrudge the costs of a $12 pizza for the staff for lunch can waste $10,000 worth of good will by this bleeding shape in the same day, and not bat an eyelash at it.

If there is one thing that needs to be fixed in American industry to make us "competitive" and "thrive" again, it is this problem. If there was only one thing we could teach in our schools and colleges, it should be how to recognize and fix this problem. After that, let the empowered work-teams and domestic-couples tackle the rest of our problems.

It's a two-stage solution pathway, and, I think the right one to pursue.