This next text is a section of of a book:
Gray, J. L., & Starke, F. A. (1988). Organizational Behavior: Concepts and Applications, 4th ed. Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing.
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This section is titled:
"Diary of a National Guard Officer Candidate School Student"
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"In the first week, the candidates were civilians in every sense. Having just arrived from civilian life they found themselves in an atmosphere of constraint and exacting regimentation. As a result, practically every individual personality trait had to be either suppressed so that it could not be detected or else transformed into organizational identification." (p. 686)
That seems not completely dissimilar to what I experienced in Vienna. But you expect that in military settings. What's the mission / biblical mandate for this kind of thing in the mission field? I wonder how any of the early apostles would have responded to this kind of thing... I bet they would have gone into a long diatribe against it.
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"The first few weeks I couldn't escape an awareness of deep-seated anxiety mixed with a vicious resentment that not only my every mannerism but also certain private domains of my personality were subject to destructive criticism. I remember a sort of private platitude became my foremost rule for every thought and action. It went something like this - "If you can be flexible enough in your overt action, you can beat this bunch of damned idiots at their own games without seriously changing your basic self" - it was a cruel game of constant pretense, one in which I was not entirely successful, however." (p. 688)
Wow! Who is this person? S/he has great personal insight!
I should say here as a commentary that only begins in Vienna, that after my experiences I don't let ANYONE attempt anything even close to a personality change or pressure me into doing or thinking something against my better judgment. NO one... EVER!
My patience for whatever I perceive to be gamesmanship is likewise about nil. Be straight with me or go away. Don't give me any hidden motives, insinuations, or whatever - I take my relationships straight... otherwise they're on the rocks. And I've been around enough, seen enough, experienced enough that I think people look at me and are surprised at what I can catch on to, because I look like this nice little sheltered upper-middle class girl that I was raised to be. But beyond the blue eyes and blond hair is an inside that has played bat with the big boys, and sometimes I've lost... big time. That's the way it goes, I guess. I can be scared, but I think it's almost impossible to intimidate me, not after the kinds of things I've been through.
I don't know what happened to this person who wrote this diary I quoted from here, but I sure wish my experiences like that had ended in Vienna. But, as my dad used to say, "if wishes were fishes we'd all live in the sea." I'm here at least to tell my story.
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Since this was a short text, I want to take a moment and tie some things together.
So far I've compared the situation in Vienna to the following types of organizations:
1) cults
2) military and/or boot camp
3) total institutions
4) high-reliability institutions
5) authoritarian organizations
6) espionage agencies
None of these is perhaps a perfect fit, but each has something in common with the mission as I experienced it in Vienna, and as such sheds some light on my experience there.
I don't know you to even be able to guess what your response is to that line up, but I don't find it very complimentary, nor very close to what I expect a mission to be and how it should operate.
And we're not even done yet! But we have come a long way, nevertheless.
But even with all the things we've discussed and are going to discuss I can't prove to you everything that I'm going to tell you and I don't know how some things happened, but I'm at a point in my life that I feel I need to lay these things out, even if I can't explain everything. Maybe someone somewhere will be able to shed some light, or not.
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I finished with my stimulator and I need to take a break now.
~ Meg
