This is http://www.essayz.com/b0002251.htm Previous-Essay <== This-Essay ==> Following-Essay Click HERE on this line to find essays via Your-Key-Words. {Most frequent wordstarts of each essay will be put here.} ========================================================== %DOMINATION SYSTEM MOTIVATIONS RATIONALIZATIONS 000225 The following may help us to work effectively with difficult people who unwittingly support "The Domination System": 1. Recognize that "ego-considerations" often play important roles in their motivations --- while they pretend/contend that high-sounding rationalizations explain what is really important in their lives. 2. To dominators it is comparisons between people's levels of power-to-control that are very important. Positive acknowledgements of people's diverse kinds of creativity, service and ways of cooperating are to them of little importance. For dominators to WIN --- other people must LOSE in publicly acknowledged ways. 3. Dominators' lives are rarely truly motivated by diverse forms of love and integration. Rather, dominators' lives are tragically motivated by manifestations of fear and alienation. Dominators do not let Love cast out fear. They often cannot let go of their fears, for they have not known love. 4. Dominators are often focused upon the development of technologies of: control, coercion, manipulation, deception, destruction, disintegration and violence. Such means are often regarded as essential to the achievement of security which is regarded as freedom from any kind of vulnerability. 5. Dominators rarely focus upon facilitating and promoting: friendships, intimacy, openness, honesty, dialogue, balance, mutuality, pleasure, responsiveness, clarifications, tolerance, health, reconciliation, healing, personal integrity, or communal integrity. 6. It is neither prudent nor wise to trust or honor dominators --- because dishonesty and deception are among their key technologies of control and manipulation. 7. Dominators are often people who stopped growing emotionally when they were children --- often because of how they were dominated by emotionally immature parents, relatives and friends. Domination is a contagious disease which often entails addictions, collusions, co- dependencies, and subtle forms of coercion and violence. 8. Dominators fear the truth about themselves and their relationships of alienation and estrangement from healthy peoples. They fear the possibilities of reconciliation, forgiveness and healing in intimate relationships which are balanced, mutual and pleasurable. 9. Dominators are often arrogant and self-righteous while trying to rationalize their dysfunctional life- styles. Their appearances of integrity are false masks which are translucent to healthy people. 10. It is neither easy nor simple to control dominators --- without becoming and continuing to be disintegrative supporters of "The Domination System." The following are helpful defenses against the disintegration which dominators engender: 1. Thoughtful/prayerful recognition of such truths as may be pointed to by the above observations. 2. Gracious withholding respect, honor and support from the disintegrative patterns of behavior which dominators engage in. 3. Working gently as peacemakers who know how to promote WIN-WIN conflict resolution by GETTING TO YES with people who do not want others to be GETTING PAST NO. See books by Fisher and Urey on conflict-resolution. 4. Focusing upon the qualities of personal relationships --- rather than upon the individuals participating as isolated elements. 5. Working to promote and facilitate diverse forms of personal and communal integrity --- rather than demanding conformity to ideal forms of being: right, good, superior, righteous, pure, perfect, etc. 6. Focusing upon helping people become liberated from their own prisons, diseases and alienations --- rather than focusing upon militaristic methods of domination and control. (c) 2005 by Paul A. Smith in (On Being Yourself, Whole and Healthy) ==========================================================