One thing I thought of last night before falling asleep was that the apparent fact that the Vienna Mission didn't seem to care that their treatment of me was basically a waste of supporters' money, in many ways. In this way, it demonstrates that accountability to supporters might not have been a very strong concern to them. This isn't too hard to believe, either, if you consider all the effort they took at developing security skills in their workers and the organization as a whole. In hiding their "true self" from the world it wouldn't be that difficult to extend that to supporters too. Of course, all kinds of organizations are known to have an external image that differs from their internal reality, but the Vienna mission took that to a new level because they had such a strong defense system set up. Probably a good chunk of their supporters agreed with their mentality and the mental gymnastics that was required to come to the various value positions that buttressed this defense effort (including the extent of their energies spent on it), so that these supporters probably accepted this variance (or would have accepted it had they known about it) between their public and private self. Again, though, in as much as these supporters were willing to live with this discrepancy, they too began potential accomplices in facilitating the mission's living a lie.
***
Now I'm returning to our text, but we're starting in a new major chapter section: "Variations in Processes of the Self."
"As noted..., our perspective assumes that the function of the self is to lend meaning and organization to one's experiences, to regulate affect, and to motivate action. The nature of one's sociocultural context and the messages about 'how to be' should have marked impact on how various self-processes (self-awareness, self-consciousness, self-monitoring, self-verification, etc.) unfold and take shape. Such a perspective affords a variety of questions. To take an example from recent empirical work, what happens to the self-evaluation processes of individuals who must contend with with persistent, unwanted and/or unsolicited feedback which focuses on their membership in various social categories or groups and ignores their individual characteristics, attributes, and actions? How might the need to consistently disavow, discount, or deny the feedback of some others influence the process of self-evaluation and self-definition? For the most part, current models of self-processes have assumed first that to the extent that individuals attend to their social environment they will receive fairly unambiguous feedback about themselves as individuals which can be integrated into the self-concept if desired. And second, these models have assumed that with some effort these individuals should be able to convey various conceptions of themselves to others with reasonable accuracy." (p.e 201)
There's a lot here, so I'll have to dissect this text a bit. In include the part of this paragraph leading up to the sentence that starts with "To take an example..." just to set the stage; I already covered that material in my last post.
The first question in this text has very real implications for my experience in Vienna, because it pretty much did that the whole time I was with it, and it did so in nonnegotiable terms to boot. In the beginning I was able to deflect their efforts by first of all using external reinforcements of my self-identity and was also buttressed in this effort by a healthy and robust sense of self, including my value structure. This text only deals with "persistent, unwanted, and/or unsolicited feedback...," which, believe it or not, falls far short of my experience in Vienna. In that context, other adverbs might serve as helpful contributions to the description of my experience of this type of pressure. I might add to the list of adverbs, for example, words such as relentless, escalating, single-minded, intentional, nonnegotiable, ubiquitous and exhaustive. In this way the question might now read:
"[W]hat happens to the self-evaluation processes of individuals who must contend with with persistent, unwanted, unsolicited, relentless, escalating, single-minded, intentional, nonnegotiable, ubiquitous and/or all-encompassing feedback which focuses on their membership in various social categories or groups and ignores their individual characteristics, attributes, and actions?"
What happens indeed! In addition, one must also keep in mind that this is coming from a total institution in a foreign country thousands of miles from home in a situation in which the feedback providers held the key to my immediate sustenance and potentially long-term career in their hands. Is it safe to say that this could be described as a sort of battle of the wills? Maybe I was like the willful child and they were the mother trying to rein me in. But not all mothers are equally good at mothering and it is possible to imagine cases where it might actually be advisable to withstand such mothers under certain circumstances, although this is not necessarily advisable as a general rule of thumb.
So there you have it, the mission dead set, hell-bent on changing me and me disliking them and the most fundamental aspects of how they wanted to change me. In such a case normally one might just walk away from them, but sometimes it's not that easy, like the risk of the soldier being court-martialed for going AWOL. But there's more to it than that too. Here are some things that may have been involved in my staying with the mission:
1. My feeling that if this failed my ministry choices were very limited. (I didn't want this to happen)
2. My feeling that if they really were as bad as it seemed this could have far flung implications as to why and how they could function as they seemed to. (I didn't want to lose faith in so much of the Christian world.)
2A. My feeling that they couldn't really be as bad as they seemed. (It couldn't be possible.)
3. My belief that there must be some inkling of reasonableness in them that might draw them to the negotiating table. (I couldn't believe that they were that stubborn and lacking in insight.)
And there's another potential factor that I've considered over the years, that might apply to this context too:
4. I may have been experiencing a certain amount of the Stockholm syndrome.
Regarding the last potential factor, I know I wasn't a hostage in the usual sense of the term, that is I didn't get into the relationship I had with the mission by means of hostage-taking. But if one is able to get past that fact, I think it is possible that there could have been some of that going on. I'm not 100% certain about this, but it seems possible to me. This sort of love-hate relationship and the resistance to believing what the mission might really be like (based on how they treated me) could be true. I rationalized any possible badness away by virtue of the good and noble work they were doing and the fact that they were otherwise so reputable (among Evangelicals back home).
Another factor might have been...
5) My not wanting to face responsibility for getting myself into the predicament I was in. Whether or not I should have taken any responsibility, it would seem at least reasonable that I might want to consider the possibility that I went wrong somehow in a way that led me to the Vienna mission that should not have led me there. However, having said this, the reader might come to a quite different conclusion to this than I would, so maybe I need to elaborate on this too. Here are some possible ways of reasoning that, I think, my taking responsibility for the position I was in vis a vis the mission:
First of all, if there was anything involving my father's work going on vis a vis my work with the Vienna mission, I would discount it in as much as I believe I had as much right to a career of my choosing as any other American citizen and no one had any right to take that away from me, especially without my permission. To say otherwise, in my mind, is to put more valuation on national military defense than on Christian ministry. From a Christian standpoint, I find such a stance untenable. God before country. I suppose it's possible that military chaplains might take issue with this.
Secondly, it would have been very difficult for me to know to expect the kind of thing I found in Vienna and since I was the only one (as far as I know) who had the kind of experiences I did no one else (including the mission) did or could have predicted such an outcome (unless, of course, the outcome was intentional on the mission leadership's part because of my dad's work).
Thirdly, I believe that at least a few missions were able to function in a more palatable (to me) manner. Child Evangelism Fellowship comes to mind as one possibility.
Moving on in our discussion of this text to the next sentence: "How might the need to consistently disavow, discount or deny the feedback of some others influence the process of self-evaluation and self-definition?"
Funny you should ask that... Consider me "Exhibit A". The effect of this process on my "self," I think, varied somewhat during my time with the mission; this is how I think it might have gone:
1. At the very first (first 1-2 months or so) it didn't affect me much at all, probably because neither I nor the mission had foreseen such a potential clash of wills, nor the strength of the other party. I for my part didn't realize the extent of their demands on me nor the extent they were willing to go to enforce these demands, and they on their part probably didn't realize the full extent of my abilities, nor the nature or strength of my convictions. I don't think they ever really understood the nature or strength of my convictions, since I kept them to myself so well (mainly because I came to have a healthy fear of what they might do if they knew about those convictions). I would characterize my stance at this time as cautious but curious.
2. During months 3 to 5 I experienced ever increasing stress, which I attribute(d) to pressure from the mission to conform/submit. However, I did not conform nor submit (because of my reservations and my facility of negotiating the Austrian context, the latter of which gave me a better vantage point to stand firm on). I would characterize my feelings at this time as stressed out.
3. The mission sent me to the US for what I call ultimate intimidation. During this time I tried to pull myself together to be able to face the mission while coming to peace with my convictions. This covered parts of months 5 and 6. In this period I was terrified of the mission and unbelieving of what was happening.
4. The next 3 months or so I spent working in the US office where they continued to observe me and I continued to observe them. I was able to master the skill of keeping my thoughts to myself and learning to walk the tightrope between being true to myself while trying to accommodate the mission's apparent demands as much as I could reasonably do (according to my convictions). At this time I was subdued; I felt stripped apart.
5. For the next 6 months or so I think the mission might have thought I'd largely succumbed, but we were both still watching each other, although they might not have thought I was still taking that stance. I resumed my external activities, which continued to be a point of aggravation between us.
6. Eventually the mission realized that I had not fully submitted and had no intention of doing so and I became more and more ostracized. At that point, any effort that might have looked like socialization had pretty well ended and they had moved on, I think, to risk and image control measures in preparation for my departure. Despite my noncooperation, however, it did come at a cost to me and I was devastated. The mission had, I think, by that time seen some of my potential but the fact that I was unwilling to accept their ways proved an insurmountable barrier on both sides. I don't think they knew why I resisted them, but by that time they might have realized that there could have been some rational reason why.
And that, in a nutshell, is the story of me and the Vienna mission. I hope it raises more questions than it answers for you, though, and that your interest will be piqued enough to learn more. The thing is that my life is not just about me, or just about the mission, but, to a large extent, it's about principles and beliefs and values. That's perhaps inordinately so because I've paid such heavy prices along the way for what I believe in. That's not to say I'm so very virtuous or that how I took these stands was necessarily the right way, however. But for the most part I did the best I could, although I probably did some stupid things along the way. But "stupid" is relative too and sometimes it's just hard to exactly know why and how things turn out the way they do and, for the Christian at least, there's always the element of trying to determine what is or might have been God's will and the possibility of His using one of His children in even the most unlikely ways at unsuspected times. So then, at least this is my approach to life, I just dust myself off, pick myself up, try to learn from the past as best I can and move on to the next thing.
The last sentence in this text, regarding current (as of 1993, when the text was published) models, it seems pretty clear that any model that assumes individuals "will receive unambiguous feedback about themselves as individuals" would necessarily be problematic and limited in its ability to define my experiences with the Vienna mission.
***
I need to get on with my day now, but I can't believe I've only discussed one segment of text! Unfortunately, there's a lot more in this section of the book chapter I'm discussing; I usually try to not break sections up, but I don't see how I can avoid it this time. But I'll pick up where I left off in my next post.
***
I found out this morning that I couldn't re-schedule my physical therapy appointment for today (I got a call late Friday that my nerve conduction test today had moved, causing a scheduling conflict for me).
