The Magic of Malicious Compliance: Why People Get Involved in Self-Sabotage

If there is such a thing as dark personal magic, then “malicious compliance” is surely one of its best and worst manifestations. Conceived as an equalizer and liberator, malicious compliance traps the malicious compiler in a conflicting cycle of self-destructive and self-destructive revenge that it is supposed to heal. In the normal world, the maliciously obedient person 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 all members of 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 for malicious compliance describes it well:

Malicious compliance is the behavior of a person who intentionally inflicts damage by strictly following management orders or following legal compulsions, knowing that compliance with the orders will cause a loss in some way that will result in damage to the business or reputation of the company. 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 members “work to govern.” It is a way of striking without strike. Wiki puts it this way:

A rule-of-thumb 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.

As I understand it, the enlisted military ranks are a good source of malicious compliance stories. There’s one about the sergeant who ordered the soldiers to grab tin buckets and mops and 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 plastic, not tin. After all, the sergeant has specified “tin buckets.”

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 commander:

As Bernie and I obediently approached his desk, he put his glasses back on his nose, allowing him to look at us in the most contemptuous way. “Now guys,” he spoke so slowly and deliberately to make sure even a Neanderthal could understand him. “I want this room to be painted white.” To add insult to injury, he ordered me to repeat his order. “You want the room to be completely white,” I repeated his order mechanically with a special emphasis on the word “everyone.” The older boy didn’t notice the bitterness in my voice, but Bernie did. He had his head down and was smiling from ear to ear ………….. Finally we decided on a solution, we would paint the room as we requested: ALL WHITE! When we came up with this solution, we were inspired … Everything was painted “white”. The ceiling, the walls, the floors, the window panes, even the desk, chair, and telephone were double-coated. Nothing was saved. The electrical switches, the door knobs and the ceiling light fixtures were not lost ………….. The older one fulfilled his wish! (quote)

Malicious obedience is a preferred method by which the (seemingly) powerless can justly punish, and perhaps correct, the rude and unfair behavior of the (seemingly) villains and powerful. Children, including very young ones, use the technique to try to punish and control their families, especially their parents. A brief tour of anyone’s memory lane will reveal thousands of moments of malicious complacency, some of them actually expressed as outward behavior. Most moments of maliciously inspired obedience are simply filed away in the child’s mind, brilliant ideas and schemes to be pulled out later in the event of extreme parental injustice.

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

Father: “Go to your room and stay there! I don’t want to see you out of that room again, do you understand?”

Child (in thought only): “Good. I will go to my room, and I will never leave, and I will pee on the floor, and I will never go to school, and I will starve, and I will smell really bad, and then you will regret it! “

Gold…

Father, during a kind of disgust: “I don’t want to hear one more sound from you, not one sound! You understand me! Right?” Many hours later, at the dinner table, long after the parent has forgotten the discomfort, the child refuses to speak to anyone. The boy’s plan is: “Good. I’ll never speak again, if that’s what you want … and then you’ll regret it!”

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 reconnect with parents, family, and life. Few children manage to never leave their rooms again, never speak again, etc. But it is the beginning that counts and the hope that underlies the beginning. The principle is that the world that parents create for their children should not be unfair, capricious, or cruel. The hope of the child, the tremendously important part of all this, is that they can correct perceived abuse and parental incompetence through the use of “industrial action in favor of children”, maliciously complying with what the authorities of the children. parents claim to want and with what these authorities inappropriately. assert about those in their power.

For example: if you, as a parent, continually tell your child the message “You are worth nothing and will never come to anything,” then your child will be tempted to maliciously obey and punish you. -for growing up and getting nowhere, and then you will regret it. However, your child’s much deeper hope is that when he realizes what he has caused, he will not only regret it and feel very, very, very bad, but he will actually change. When you, the parent, change, things will get better for the child and for everyone else in the family. Therefore, in the domain of the child’s powerful and unaware creativity (the domain of beliefs and decisions), all your child has to do to force him to improve things is make sure that things really, really stay. , Really. bad forever, or until it changes, whichever comes first. (For a humorous and magnificently worthy of a malicious smirk, watch 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 obedience (“I will punish you being who you say I am”) into “beatific obedience” (“I will save us all by making you better parents”). it is incredibly long-lived. The identity of a young child has no power in painful and abusive situations, except for two things: the child can control the intensity and duration of his own suffering, nothing more. In families in desperate pain, children are forced to conclude that they can never be good enough, perfect enough, smart enough, etc., to stop Mom and Dad from doing it wrong. This then requires the children to go to their own maliciously / beatifically compliant Plan B: “Dear Mom and Dad, I can’t stop you from doing it wrong, but you can’t stop me from doing it wrong, and maybe even worse, So I’m in charge of all this, not you. I can control how I feel and determine who I am, not you. I’ll protect and cover you. I’ll make sure you don’t. Don’t hurt me. I’ll hurt myself instead. And I will never let this change until you have the opportunity to develop a little more and do things well, because that is how much I love you. ” Malicious compliance is thus transformed into 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 twisted, crooked, and ugly. Harming ourselves our entire lives, insisting on a reality in which we are unworthy, unpleasant, or insecure, in an impractical effort to retroactively redeem our parents and correct our family history, is a deeply beautiful expression of truly ugly love.

This is where we go back to “World’s Worst Belief.” As you may recall from our previous article, the world’s worst belief 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 outdated creature-level security patterns of their brain, everyone with this “worst belief” also operates from malicious and delicious compliance. The mischievous expression goes something like, “I’ll show you! If you’re going to make it so scary to be me, then I’ll be scared my whole life! And I hope you’re watching as it happens! I’ll be sorry!” and loving is: “Dear parents, if you can’t do better than make it totally scary to be me, then in your honor I’ll keep it totally scary, until you can do better. be able to be good parents. It’s not good for you if you don’t you are good parents. “

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

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

© 2009 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

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