Stress Management, Up Against a Charismatic Foe
Can You Think for Yourself when under Stress?
Dateline: Oops. When the trial of James Arthur Ray–charged with being responsible for the sweat lodge deaths of three of his “students” went into indefinite recess, I dropped the ball on those Young Americans in the charter plane, losing engines by the minute. The follow-up on Stress Management for the Psychologically Inept, End Compulsive Helping will follow this entry.
But first, we return to the fate of the flyers and the question, “How well can you think for yourself when in a peer-pressure stressful situation led by a charismatic speaker?”
Stress Set-up: Sixty people,
including yours truly, are in a four-engined charter plane, twenty minutes south out of Las Vegas. The windows on the right side of the plane are coated with black oil. Now we have three engines…now two. Say what? Fire, you say?… I, along with the other passengers, had to decide to ignore fear and do as the pilot said…or make a break.
The Leader Who Promises to Relieve Your Stress
One factor to be considered when musing over what we might have done if had we been in that sweat lodge–is just how persuasive some people can be. How anxiety driven and needy would a man have to be to convince 900 people to commit suicide? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones Oh, I know, without knowing James Arthur Ray, we assume he couldn’t fool us. But we don’t know. Remember, just as group members’ capacities for thinking for themselves were partly determined by emotional functioning levels—the master himself was driven by the same emotional needs. He was as determined to quiet his anxiety by
pushing others to not think as the others were determined to quiet anxiety by following orders. Neither is free. Neither is consulting their Thinking Guidance System.
Bowen theory on Differentiation: “The less developed a person’s ‘self,’ the more impact others have on his functioning and the more he tries to control, actively or passively, the functioning of others.” Full text: http://www.thebowencenter.org/
The person who needs to dominate others to calm himself down and to bolster his sense of self, that is, his Pseudo Self??, is acting out the flip side of the anxiety coin. Desperate ‘leader’ meets desperate ‘followers’. Desperate leaders are often
highly skilled and believe in their superior knowledge to the point of rationalizing almost any behavior. When the FDLS community house in El Dorado, Texas was raided, a video was made of the house’s vast interior. Each room was decorated with a picture of their leader and had no other adornments. http://www.eldoradoflds.us/
Now, back to Stressful Set-up No. 2: My weekend buddies and me in the floundering airplane. The pilot has reassured us saying we had nothing to fear. He could get us back to Vegas if he only had one of the four engines going and, at present, he had two. He told us not to over-react to the black oil covering the windows of the plane. Why? Because he’d feathered the engines to cut down on the likelihood of engines catching fire. Yeah! I know! He says, “to cut down on the likelihood.” Is
he crazy?
But wait. Not to worry. Pilots are such reliable professionals. They always know what they are doing. Heck, they don’t get to wear those impressive dark uniforms with the wings on the shoulders and the captain’s hats without being experts.
Now we’re flying very low over the desert. Very low. Consensus is this pilot is going to try to land in the sand. We demand the pilot come out and address his passengers, a demand we know will lead to our being calmed by his tight military
presence.
A freakishly tall man in Bermuda shorts and a purple T-shirt with a yellow Che Guevara screen-painted on his chest burst out of the cockpit in his flip-flops. His electric red dreadlocks swung as he talked. He chastised us as a bunch of weenies who didn’t know anything about anything. He assured us we’d make an unscheduled landing in El Paso to “take care of a few maintenance details” and then we’d be back on track for an Austin arrival. He said he’d appreciate us having faith in him and re-boarding the plane once the “few maintenance details” had been corrected.
Think tent flap. I, along with my fellow passengers clamored over each other to disembark in El Paso. Why not walk off in an orderly fashion? Those who got off first would be first in line at the Southwest Airlines counter.
