I participated in a charter school created expressly for teenage children politely referred to as "at-risk."[144] Actually, these folks had long since jumped out of the "at-risk" category into the profoundly dangerous category of outlier-cum-criminal as adjudicated and judged by the powers that be. In their high level of identity neediness, their egos expressed these needs in some interesting ways all of which older people and authority figures found aggressive, disrespectful, a very insubordinate. Through their body language, I often perceived them as expressing some levels of defiance and contempt. I wanted to work with these students, and I liked them. Still, I found this body language difficult to deal with. I actually felt an adult and teacherly resentment of their attitude, so-called. In such moments, I thought, "What's your problem?" That felt quite natural. If I were asked and answered honestly and immediately, I would say they had a problem, and that their attitude irritated me. In a sense, I felt that. Except, it was their school I had joined, and such feelings had no part of their school.
After some critical reflection, I realized that my "feelings" functioned not as authentic feelings but meaning perspective driven judgments. As an authority figure, liberal to radical or not, "I deserved respect on my terms," spake the meaning perspective. This perspective motivated me to see and judge these students as violators of that meaning perspective of respect. I feel rather ill looking back on this, but I escaped from the throes of this meaning perspective. Thinking about our discussion, Compassionate Communication, I realize now, also means Compassionate Thinking and Feeling. At the time, my commitments as a teacher and as a human being stood in direct conflict with my supposed feelings. Such cognitive and emotional dissonance brought me to a critical moment I needed to resolve. I asked myself whose problem was the one I saw, mine or theirs. Uncomfortable as it made me, I knew in a blink it was mine. However they acted, whatever their intention, I could choose my response, and I could choose acceptance and the unconditional not resentment or even anger. I could feel and did feel compassion for the profound neediness their performance elicited from my authentic emotions. That feeling of compassion came to me as very authentic indeed.
I came to work with these folks as their teacher in an I/Thou relationship. If I violated that relationship, reified them into It, I fell deeply into the inauthentic, in the very kind of violence that caused the very neediness their apparent attitude disguised and repressed. My supposed feelings of irritation came from a meaning perspective and, now that I think about it again, my fear of my powerlessness to help them. Such a feeling certainly meant that I lost even more power to offer them the essential thing they needed. Not surprisingly, they needed, craved, and fought off mightily, unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and the binding element of acceptance. Authentic feelings may not come to us immediately but hidden behind the complexities and obscurities of meaning perspectives and the habits of mind that these perspectives produce. When we feel the tension this produces in us, we recognize a dissonance that makes for a critical moment. In response to that moment, we can choose to question our immediate and often unproductive "natural feelings." In the critical reflection that can follow, we can choose to better fulfill the needs of the situation and our authentic feelings based in our essential belief in and desire for the unconditional.
Compassionate Communication also brings us back to Frankl and our freedom of response. It's not what other people do. It's how we choose to respond to what they do.