Okay, my approach to this is not going to be befitting of my educational background (2 graduate certificates, 2 master's degrees and 60 credits towards a doctorate), but fibromyalgia has affected my mental capacity and other health issues don't help.
Before I jump into the main body of this post, I want to present an aside here, that's fully in the present, rather than the distant past.
I just found the first start of a cucumber on one of my 3 cucumber plants! I'm so excited. A few days ago I also noticed that one of my hubbard squash plants has buds on it too. The bees have to cross-pollinate them though, as they have male and female flowers and only the female ones develop into squash if they're pollinated from the male blooms. This and cooking are my little diversions.
I'm not exactly sure how to preface this series (it undoubtedly will not be covered completely in this one post), but it's going to cover things related to my missions experience in Vienna along the lines of socialization, which is (according to Wikipedia):
"Socialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, politicians and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting norms, customs and ideologies. It may provide the individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within their own society; a society itself is formed through a plurality of shared norms, customs, values, traditions, social roles, symbols and languages. Socialization is thus ‘the means by which social and cultural continuity are attained’."
I'll still need to later on cover some things from before Vienna, but this will begin to set the stage for my Vienna experience.
Because I'm not cognitively up to Bloom's higher levels of learning, namely, synthesis and evaluation, I'm going to take this piecemeal, which unfortunately puts the onus of synthesis and evaluation on the reader. At least I picked out the texts to base my comments on, so I did that much of the grunt work for you. I did that about 15 years ago on a return visit to the States in which a friend kindly put me up which allowed me to do this research. It would be harder for me to do now.
Also, last night I reread all my journal entries from the year after Vienna and also a small part of the human rights report I mentioned in an earlier post and it was almost like reading about someone else's life - so much has happened since then that it's hard to believe that I've been through everything I have. The last year I've sort of become myopic as I just try to keep myself together somehow, so anything that involves a bigger picture outside my immediate present life has been virtually sidelined.
I'm just going to take the texts in order, picking out sections to cite and comment regarding how they fit into my experience in Vienna.
The first citations are from:
Friedman, M.I. & Lackey, Jr., G.H. (1991). The Psychology of Human Control: A General Theory of Purposeful Behavior. Praeger: New York, NY.
After demonstrating that humans seek control and that this is done by purposeful behavior that is based on the ability gained from past experience to accurately identify behavior -> outcome chains of causality, they say this:
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"In a nutshell, we decided that predictive ability (accurate prediction) is the factor most responsible for humans' superior control." (p. 25)
In Vienna, I didn't feel like I could accurately predict outcomes of behavior... but ONLY as it related to my connections with the mission, NOT with others, although there were a couple exceptions which I might get into later. This seems strange to me because these were not only mainly North Americans (with a few Europeans and one Australian in the mix). And they were also Evangelical Christians, and I'd had a lot of contact with Evangelical Christians in different places, denominations, and contexts (conferences, Bible school, talking at churches - "deputation", etc.). S
This inability to accurately predict consequences of actions was very debilitating to me.
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"After probing the literature on learning, we came to the conclusion that two conditions need to be present for cause-effect learning to occur. As indicated, cause-effect learning required the making and testing of predictions. It would follow, then, that for learning to occur people must be in a situation sufficiently familiar and stable to allow them to make and test predictions. If the situation were totally unfamiliar or chaotic they would be unable to make and test predictions." (p. 64)
My situation in Vienna, certainly most of the time if not all of it, was exactly chaotic, especially, but also unfamiliar in many ways. So at a time when I should have been being socialized into the organization (even benign socialization, such as getting to know the ins and outs of any new job), this was being thwarted by the seeming unpredictability of responses and expectations. This will come up again, I'm sure, in a couple other ways of looking at it (from other sources, not just this book).
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"When situations are optimally predictable they are familiar and stable enough to predict outcomes and novel enough to allow us to improve predictability. When outcomes are either too predictable or too unpredictable motivation is frustrated." (p. 67)
I don't think I'd been there very long before I figured out some kind of "game" was going on, with some intentional testing and the like. I did sort of take a risk (and lose) by figuring they'd eventually "play straight" with me, and so I got my grounding mostly outside the organization, such as my participation in an Austrian (German-speaking) church and taking an after-hours German class and also Spanish cooking class, both at a Volkshochschule (adult education center). I thought I had too much to offer for them to just spit me out - after all leadership in one of the leading missions to Eastern Europe (the Slavic Gospel Association) had courted me! I was dead wrong on that assumption. So I don't think I was ever an "insider" in the mission in Vienna. So my observations about the mission are as from someone who was basically an outsider there for 2 years.
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"We redirect our pursuit of control because control is impossible due to physical or mental limitations." (p. 69)
I think I might add to this that in my case it was against my values to act in such a manipulative controlling manner, which is what the unpredictability smacked of to me. It wasn't because of physical or mental limitations that control was impossible to me in that context.
I think my discussion of the previous citation deals with the redirecting of pursuit of control part of this quote. I guess that's what I did - redirect my pursuit of control to something more controllable, namely Austria and Austrians, rather than 60 expats and their families (i.e., the mission).
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"Self-confident people are more able to tolerate delay in achieving control, are more willing to take calculated risks, and are more persistent in pursuing control, all of which make it more probable that they will improve their scope, degree, and reliability of control. Self-confident people tend to be dogged and venturesome in their pursuit of control and don't lose heart when obstacles delay their progress. Their confidence leads them to believe that sooner or later they will be successful in improving their control." (p. 73)
This is like music to my ears! After reading my journal entries last night from the year after Vienna, it's encouraging to think that maybe I really did have self-confidence even through all the heart-wrenching events that really shook me up and turned my whole life upside-down.
I've definitely been dogged and persistent in my adult life. I had this idea that no one could tell me it's impossible to work in the USSR/Russia. No one. A year after Vienna I decided on another route and, by golly, I did it. I went for it and... well that's getting too far ahead of my story though. I was down but not out, as the saying goes.
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That's all for tonight. It's 12:34 a.m. according to my computer clock, so it's time for me to go to bed. Maybe after that last thought I'll have good dreams, although I hardly ever remember my dreams.
Good night!
~ Meg
