If there is such a thing as personal dark magic, then “malicious compliance” is surely one of its best and worst manifestations. Designed as an equalizer and liberator, malicious compliance traps the malicious compiler in a conflicting cycle of self-destructive, self-destructive revenge that it is supposed to cure. In the normal world, the obedient person maliciously seeks to harm another by doing exactly what the other wants. In Marin-style NLP, what I also notice is that the maliciously obedient person also seeks to heal everyone in his family, his family of origin. More on this part later in the article.

Malicious compliance is a tactic to cause pain and revenge. The Wikipedia entry on malicious compliance describes it well:

Malicious compliance is the behavior of a person who intentionally inflicts harm by strictly following management orders or complying with legal obligations, knowing that compliance with the orders will cause a loss in some way resulting in business or reputational harm. of the manager, or a loss to an employee or subordinate. In effect, it is a form of sabotage used to harm leadership or used by leadership to harm subordinates.

When unions want to punish management, they make their union members “work to rule.” It is a form of hitting without a strike. Wiki puts it this way:

A rule job is malicious compliance used as a form of industrial action, in which rules are deliberately followed to the letter in a deliberate attempt to reduce employee productivity.

From what I understand, the armed forces enlisted ranks are a good source for malicious compliance stories. There is one about the sergeant who ordered the privates to get tin buckets and mops and to clean the floor of a huge empty building. The sergeant returned hours later. The men were standing in the supply shed, “waiting for orders,” because the only buckets they could find in the shed were made of plastic, not tin. After all, the sergeant has specified “tin pails.”

Here is an excerpt from a current blog. The writer recounts his experience as an enlisted man in the Air Force, dealing one day with a particularly arrogant major:

As Bernie and I obediently approached his desk, he pushed his glasses back up on his nose, allowing him to look at us in the most contemptuous manner. “Now guys,” she spoke so slowly and deliberately to make sure even a Neanderthal could understand. “I want this room painted white.” To add insult to injury, she ordered me to repeat her order. “You want the room all white,” I mechanically repeated her order with special emphasis on the word “all.” The commander didn’t hear the bitterness in my voice, but Bernie did. He had his head down and a smile from ear to ear…. Finally we came to a solution, we would paint the room as requested: ALL WHITE! When we came up with this solution, we were inspired… Everything was painted “white”. The ceiling, walls, floors, window panes, and even the desk, chair, and telephone were double-layered. Nothing was saved. Electrical switches, doorknobs and ceiling lamps were not lost… The eldest fulfilled his wish! (quote)

Malicious enforcement is a preferred method by which the (apparently) powerless righteous can punish, and perhaps correct, the rude and unjust behavior of the (apparently) powerful and wicked. Children, even the smallest ones, use the technique to try to punish and control their families, especially their parents. A brief walk down anyone’s memory lane will reveal thousands of moments of malicious compliance, some of them actually expressed as outward behavior. Most moments of inspired malicious compliance are simply filed away in the child’s mind, bright ideas and schemes to be brought out later in the event of extreme parental injustice.

All malicious schemes begin with the words “I’ll show you!” Some simple examples:

Father: “Go to your room and stay there! I never want to see you outside that room again, do you understand me?”

Child (only in thought): “Fine. I’ll go to my room, and I’ll never leave, and I’ll pee on the floor, and I’ll never go to school, and I’ll starve, and I’ll smell really bad, and then you’ll be sorry!” !”

Prayed…

Father, during some kind of upset: “I don’t want to hear one more sound from you, not one more sound! Do you understand me? Right?” Many hours later, at the dinner table, long after the father has forgotten the upset, the boy refuses to speak to anyone. The child’s plan is, “Okay. I’ll never talk again, if that’s what you want…and then you’ll be sorry!”

Of course, in the usual flow of familiar give-and-take, these complacent revenge fantasies are short-lived; they are quickly displaced by the child’s desire to re-engage with parents, family, and life. Few children actually manage to never leave their rooms again, or ever speak again, and so on. But it is the beginning of the thing that counts, and the hope that underlies the beginning. The principle is that the world parents create for their children should not be unfair, capricious, or cruel. The hope of the child, the tremendously important part of all of this, is that they can correct the perceived abuse and incompetence of the parents by using “industrial actions for the children”, maliciously complying with what the parental authorities say they want, and with what these authorities unduly assert about those in their power.

For example, if you, as a parent, continually hammer your child with the message, “You’re worthless and you’ll never amount to anything,” then your child will be tempted to indulge you maliciously and punish you. -When you grow up and come to nothing, and then you’ll regret it. However, his son’s much deeper hope is that when he realizes what he has caused, he will not only repent and feel really, really, really bad, but actually change. When you, the parent, change, then things will be better for the child and everyone else in the family. So, in the child’s domain of powerful, unaware creativity (the domain of beliefs and decisions), all your child has to do to force you to make things better is to make sure things stay really, really good. , Really. bad-forever, or until you change, whichever comes first. (For a superbly wince-worthy, humorous demonstration, see the “soap poisoning” sequences in Gene Sheppard’s A Christmas Story.)

The unconscious pattern at the identity level that arises from this transformation from malicious compliance (“I will punish you by being who you say I am”) into “beatific compliance” (“I will save us all by making you better parents”). it is impressively long-lived. A young child’s identity is powerless in painful and abusive situations, except for two things: the child can control the intensity and duration of his or her own suffering, nothing more. In desperately hurting families, children are forced to conclude that they can never be good enough, perfect enough, smart enough, etc., to keep Mom and Dad from doing wrong. So this requires the kids to resort to their own malicious/beatific Plan B of compliance: “Dear Mom and Dad, I can’t stop you from doing it wrong, but you can’t stop me from keeping it wrong, and maybe I even will.” . it’s worse, so I’m actually in charge of all this horror, not you. I can control how I feel and determine who I am, not you. I will protect and cover you. I’ll make sure you don’t. You didn’t hurt me. I’ll hurt myself instead. And I’ll never let this change until you have a chance to develop a little more and do things right, because that’s how I love you.” Malicious compliance thus becomes delicious compliance.

In Marin-style NLP, we assume that all children love their parents and that all parents love their children. This is not a variable in life. What does vary is how this love will be shown. Some families are lucky enough to be able to show love as love. In other families, love will show up as something twisted, crooked and ugly. Harming ourselves for a lifetime, by insisting on a reality in which we are unworthy, unsavory, or insecure, in an unworkable effort to retroactively redeem our parents and correct our family’s history, is a profoundly beautiful expression of truly loving love. ugly.

This is where we come back to “The World’s Worst Belief.” As you may remember from our previous article, the worst belief in the world is, “The most dangerous thing I can do is think I’m not in danger.” In addition to having to deal with being hijacked by their brain’s antiquated creature-level security pattern, everyone with this “worst belief” also operates from delightful, malicious compliance. The malicious expression is something like, “I’ll show you! If you’re going to make it so scary to be me, I’m going to be scared my whole life! And I hope you’re watching while it happens! And then you’ll be sorry!” The loving and delicious version is: “Dear parents, if you can’t do better than make it totally terrifying to be me, then, in your honor, I’ll keep it totally terrifying, until you can do better. I want you to be able to be good parents.” It’s not good for you if you’re not a good parent.”

Therefore, to revise the “worst belief” we have to update our old pattern of safety and move away from the comforts of our equally old pattern of malicious and (arrogantly, pointlessly) loving compliance. The good news is that both these transitions and revisions are available. In fact, we all seem wired to naturally install these updates as soon as we’re ready, as soon as we want to enable the new experiences.

Coming soon: “The best update for the worst belief”

© 2009 Carl Buchheit and PNL Marin