Compliance and Defiance

Troy, a 27-year-old with an Ivy League MBA, was recently referred by a retiring colleague. I was told to be aware that Troy was prone to be passive-aggressive toward authority due to a traumatic event in his childhood.

On his initial visit, I asked Troy his profession and he replied his specialty was market statistics, correlating sales with TV advertising. I said that must be interesting, and he replied that advertising agencies, such as those he’d worked for, relied on viewer recognition for effectiveness, rather than sales, duping themselves and their clients.

When asked how many agencies he had worked for, Troy replied he had five different employers over the last two years, but after a brief honeymoon with each, he became angry at his bosses and ended up quitting. I gave a questioning look. Troy told me that he was simply looking for the right job. I told Troy the problem was not his job, but related to the traumatic event I had been briefed by his former therapist.

Troy was not the first born, but may as well have been. Since his brother was six years older and his sister eight years older, he had his mother pretty much to himself, except for his father. When Troy was about six-years-old, he arose early one morning and entered his parents’ bedroom. His dad was having sexual intercourse with mom and told Troy to leave the room. Later that morning, Troy, confused by what he had seen earlier, was looking around his parents’ bedroom when his mother appeared nude in the doorway from the bathroom. His mother jumped back, robed herself, came forward and proceeded to lecture Troy on the need to observe his parents’ privacy.

Troy felt rejected and enraged. That afternoon he threw out his mother’s favorite Swiss chocolates. Father arrived home, sat the boy on his knee, and asked, “You don’t want to hurt your mother, do you Troy?” Troy’s heart froze in fear. (Yes, he wanted to hurt his mother, but to say so might cause the wrath of his father to hurt him in the same manner as his father had “hurt” his mother that morning during the sex act.) Fear of discovery, repression of anger, and impotence followed.

I advised Troy that he had subordinated himself to the embedded voice of his father’s authority as a child and had never learned to trust his own voice. His bosses at work may not have been aware of his repressed fear and anger, but they would quickly pick up on his dependency hang-up. It was now time to decide if he wanted to continue becoming defiant by quitting his jobs or to become his own person and take charge of his life.

“But how,” Troy asked. I told him that compliance and defiance were two sides of the same mindset—both reactive, neither proactive. Only be learning to make decisions based upon likely consequences could he become his own person. Since he had experienced the same outcome on every job, he may want to start taking charge of his life by trying something different.

“When you leave here today, I want you to come up with five scenarios at work where you take charge by disagreeing with your bosses. You can’t blame them anymore than you can continue to blame your childhood trauma for making poor choices. This means becoming your own man, taking personal responsibility for your views while respecting the views of others, prepared to lose some and win some.”

As I reflected on Troy that evening, I was reminded of George Simmel, an early sociologist I discovered in graduate school. He held that the majority of adult men and women wanted to be dominated by powerful leaders. Autocratic leaders were sought out to relieve the stress of individual responsibility. An autocratic leader would protect the majority not only against the outside world, but also against themselves.

In Simmel’s analysis, as in Troy’s case, compliance and defiance are ways to avoid taking personal responsibility, not just for the common good, but also for liberating one’s perpetual anxiety, fear, and anger.

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This blog was co-published with PsychResilience.com