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Is Alec
Baldwin Really a Jerk?
By Melody Brooke
Okay, so the entire world knows that Alec Baldwin talked horribly to
his little girl. We all know that speaking that way to an
11-year-old girl is rehensible and clearly abusive. All across the
country people are jumping on the bandwagon to engage in attacking
him for his behavior. He has been villainized in the press, on radio
talk shows and, of course by his ex-wife, with a vengeance. The
media love this kind of drama. We have a bad father who verbally
abuses his child and the public eats it up. We have someone we can
publicly ostracize for their outlandish behavior. The courts
validate our outrage and his villainy by preventing him access to
his child, and we all feel better that justice has been done.
What we have done, as a public audience to this
drama, is to let ourselves get caught up in the blame game. Oh, how
we love to have someone to blame. Alec was a perfect target for our
blame. Unfortunately, the process of blame unites us against someone
without regard for compassion or full understanding of the
situation. (Who released that recording to the media anyway? And,
hasn’t Kim Bassinger been held in contempt numerous times for not
respecting court orders?) It hooks us into a cycle of identifying
someone as the Perpetrator and someone else as the Victim, and then
of course, someone else as the Rescuer. We lock these individuals
into these roles and never mind the reality of anyone else’s true
accountability. The roles are comfortable to us. We find comfort in
the simplicity and can feel justified in our outrage at the
Perpetrators behavior.
The problem is that these roles help us to
make sense of our world and keep us stuck in a cycle that has no
room for anything but continued drama and pain. The roles are more
accurately understood as: Self-Protector (instead of Perpetrator),
Rescuer (or caretaker), and Victim.
Why Self-Protector? A Self-Protector is
someone who is desperate to protect him (or her) self from continued
pain and fear. They sense themselves to be under attack in some real
or imagined way and this can result in unpredictably dangerous or
abusive behavior simply because the person feels completely
powerless. Think of a trapped animal. Trapped, and animals instincts
take over and there is no accounting for how they will respond.
Humans, as much as we like to think otherwise, are animals too. We
will react with the same survival mechanisms as any mammal.
Does anyone ever stop to think about how the
alleged “perpetrator” was provoked? I am not implying that being
provoked justifies an outrageous response (i.e. calling your 11 year
old daughter a “pig”) but it does force us to have some
understanding and not blame him (or her) for the entire situation.
I would wager that any of us, at certain
times, have behaved in ways that we are not proud. We may have
treated our own children, our lovers, or our spouses in ways that we
later regret and have to make apologies for later. The people
closest to us, simply because they are so important to us, are the
most likely to evoke these irrational and rehensible acts. Can you
honestly say that you have never been provoked to behave in a way
that you later regretted with a family member?
The reality is that we, as a culture, and as a
nation, must come to a different way of understanding the conflicts
that occur in our lives. Conflict is a natural part of living and it
is not a “bad” thing. It does however, evoke the worst in us when we
are caught up in the roles of Self-Protector, Rescuer and Victim.
These roles dictate that we behave in certain set ways and provoke
certain set responses from others. This is exactly what occurs in
gang warfare. One gang member shoots another gang’s member and
retaliation is required to regain a position of strength. So the
gang goes into Self-Protector mode to protect the reputation of the
gang and they shot a member of the other gang to get their “rep”
back. But of course this requires the other gang to do the same. The
cycle cannot end as long as the survival mechanisms of the cycle are
in place.
If we continue to engage in the blame game of
pointing a finger at the bad guy and saying “Shame on you” then we
perpetuate the cycle of pain and misery that the blame game
engenders. Jumping on the bandwagon to blame Alec Baldwin for what
is publicly a bad situation (that none of us knows all the details
of), seduces us into believing there is a “bad-guy” and a
“good-guy”. And worse, it keeps us caught in the cycle of pain and
misery from which there is no escape.
Without question, Alec Baldwin needs help, so
does Kim Bassinger, and most of all, their poor daughter who is
caught in the middle. But we do not help her, or any of them, but
identifying one of them as the “bad-guy” and the other as a Victim.
These are the automatic mammalian brain responses to perceived
threat.
Fortunately we are not mindless animals. We
are able to consider our behavior and make choices. Many of us don’t
even realize we have a choice. We think that the automatic
reactivity our survival mechanisms dictate is the only way to
survive. But we do have a choice and we can learn to respond to
conflict differently. We can learn the mechanisms of compassion and
choose different reactions. But first we have to understand what the
choices are and how to go about the difficult process of learning do
respond differently. Compassion is comprised of empathy, respect and
ownership. Learning how to apply these concepts to our lives can
transform how we feel about ourselves and respond to others.
Melody Brooke, MA, LPC, LMFT is an author,
motivational speaker, workshop presenter and counselor. Melody holds
an MA in Counseling and Guidance from Texas Woman’s University. She
is also a Certified Radix Practitioner, Right Use of Power Teacher
and InterPlay Teacher. Melody's 19 years work with individuals,
couples and families provides her with a unique approach to solving
clients’ problems. Her life-altering book, “Cycles of the Heart: A
way out of the egocentrism of everyday life”, is based on her
experience helping people resolve their relationship difficulties
with themselves and others.
