Creating Peace with Peace

Ryan J. Anderson, Ph.D., LMFT

The day I first met Ed was pretty unforgettable. While many students go through what I call a “shock and awe” period as the fact that they are now in the wilderness begins to really sink in, Ed seemed determined to break some kind of record for the most memorable and most tumultuous entry into Outback. His angry outbursts could be heard from far away. He screamed, ranted, and used profanities at a rate that was prodigious, really. He absolutely seethed with hostility towards everyone around him. He presented a façade that was intimidating, even frightening.  He laid on the ground, often with his back turned to anyone who tried to speak with him. When he looked at us, his eyes were dark and threatening. He would use his considerable physical size to strike an intimidating stance. He demanded to be returned home immediately. The message he gave was very clear: stay away! Don’t even try to reach me, I’m not interested. I hate you.

When his therapist, Phil, and I tried to speak with him, he didn’t hesitate to go for our jugulars, so to speak. “I want to know how you really feel about yourselves,” he challenged. “You take kids away from their homes, you f*** up their lives, all just so you can make yourselves rich. How do you f***ing sleep at night?” We would come to learn that he was really quite skilled in making his accusations personal and sticking it to people where it could hurt the very most. That was the way that he had learned to handle other problems in his life, and that was the way he was trying to handle Outback, which he saw as a problem at the time of his arrival.

He warned us not to try to change his mind about anything. “You can ask my dad, once I have made up my mind, I never change it. That’s just the way I am.” He stated, in no uncertain terms, that he had made up his mind that Outback had nothing to offer him, that he hated this place, and that he hated his parents for sending him here. Nothing was going to change that, he claimed, so we might as well go away and leave him alone. We weren’t going to get him to do anything. He could wait us out.

It doesn’t take much imagination to guess how others might have responded to his behavior in the past. One natural reaction was to feel intimidated by his screaming, yelling, cursing, and physical size. Another natural reaction was to take offense at his biting comments and fight back. As natural as these reaction are, both of them would only serve to complicate the issue. By reacting by being intimidated, Ed would feel reinforced in his use of anger and hostility. It would send the message that using those tactics got him what he wanted. By reacting by taking offense and fighting back, Ed would feel like his accusations against us were justified, and that therefore his actions against us were also justified. One can only imagine how many times those very dynamics had played themselves out in Ed’s life before he came to Outback.

Ed’s heart was at war. By having his heart at war, he had come to see the world around him as a place filled with enemies, with things trying to conquer him and things to be conquered by him. He used anger to keep what he felt were threats at bay, and he used drugs as comfort. His attempts to solve his problems created more problems. His life was in a downward spiral of anger, hatred, and warfare. He felt pain, he caused pain, and he reaped pain in return.

I think Ed expected us to respond with warfare, as well. I think he expected us to lecture, to punish, and to manipulate him. I think he expected us to tell him that he couldn’t feel what he was feeling. I think he expected us to shame him for the way he was acting. At Outback, though, what students like Ed find is very different from what they expect. I remember watching Phil sit down with Ed for a very, very long time as Ed shouted, screamed, and pounded the ground and the trees with his fist. Phil never got upset, he never got offended, and he never got scared. He listened empathically. He responded calmly. He tried to hear what Ed was really saying and not get lost in what Ed was saying so loudly, because the two were not the same.

This picture repeated itself many times. Phil and other Outback staff would converse and interact with Ed and would patiently go through the process of speaking to him and trying to listen to him in spite of his tirades and diatribes. Rather than resisting him, we were responding to him… not to what he was screaming at us, but to what he was saying underneath the screaming.

This doesn’t mean that Ed was allowed to do whatever he wanted. There were standards that were necessary for survival in the wilderness and for the well being of each student and the group, and these standards were held without compromise. It also doesn’t mean that Ed wasn’t challenged; he was, time and time again. However, no matter how often Ed would send out his invitation to war, nobody accepted it. Instead, he met people who would listen patiently while he spoke. He met people who would help him learn when he was struggling with a wilderness survival skill, even if he had just tried to insult them. He met people who could empathize with his pain, his discomfort, and his embarrassment. He met people who recognized and appreciated the good in him, who genuinely cared about his wellbeing, and who responded to his needs. Although he approached us with a heart at war, we approached him with a heart at peace. This did not mean that we did not have expectations and standards for him to fulfill. This did not mean that we were not dedicated to helping him to change. This meant that we refused to take part in the old cycles that perpetuated his problems, and that we were dedicated to approaching him in a different way.

We did not demand him to change; we invited him to change with both our words and our way of being towards him. And gradually, those changes began to happen. The angry outbursts became less and less frequent and less and less severe. We began to be impressed as we saw him encounter situations that would have paralyzed him with rage before and respond to them in a productive manner. We saw him begin to handle frustration and disappointment with a much more even head. We saw him begin to respond to us and to his family with more respect. Suddenly, we were able to talk to him about things that he never would have listened to us about before. Suddenly we were able to help him begin to evaluate his own thoughts, attitudes, and actions, whereas before he would have fought us to the death, so to speak. Suddenly, we had new options for solutions with him, ones that never existed when he was approaching us with a heart at war, and ones that certainly would not have existed if we had participated in his warfare.

We responded to him with interventions that were deeper than our behavior; we responded to him with a heart at peace towards him in spite all of his efforts to offend us and push us away. Through that, we were able to invite him to look deeper than his own behavior, as well, and by doing so he began to willingly relinquish many of his harmful actions. By going deeper than his behavior with him, his behavior began to change. We did not make him jump through hoops or work through levels. We did not punish him, shame him, threaten him, or scare him. We responded to him, and by building our relationship with him in that way we were able to create an influence with him where he would willingly work with us, rather than have us locked in a battle of wills with him.

This approach, of creating peace with peace, is part of what makes Outback unique. This helps us work through resistance, hostility, and all kinds of defensiveness where other approaches have not worked. When change happens in this sort of environment, it is not because it is forced or coerced; it is because it is chosen. Change that is chosen is much more likely to be change that lasts.