The Magic of Malicious Compliance: Why People Engage 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. Designed as an equalizer and liberator, malicious compliance traps the malicious compiler in a conflictual cycle of self-defeating, self-defeating revenge that it is supposed to heal. In the normal world, the obedient person maliciously 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 everyone in their family, their family of origin. More on this part later in the article.

Malicious compliance is a tactic to cause pain and get revenge. The Wikipedia entry on malicious compliance describes it well:

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

A job by rule 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 ranks of the military are a good source of malicious compliance stories. There’s one about the sergeant who ordered the privates to get tin buckets and mops and mop 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 made of 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 major:

As Bernie and I obediently walked over to his desk, he pushed his glasses back up his nose, allowing him to look at us in the most contemptuous way. “Now guys,” she spoke so slowly and deliberately to make sure even a Neanderthal could understand. “I want this room painted white.” To add insult to injury, she ordered me to repeat her order. “You want the room all white,” I mechanically repeated her command with special emphasis on the word “all.” The commander didn’t catch the bitterness in my voice, but Bernie did. He had his head down and a grin from ear to ear…. Finally we came to a solution, we would paint the room as requested: ALL WHITE! When we found this solution, we were inspired… Everything was painted “white”. The ceiling, walls, floors, window panes, and even the desk, chair, and telephone had a double layer. Nothing was saved. Electrical switches, doorknobs and ceiling lamps were not lost… The eldest fulfilled his wish! (price)

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

All malicious 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 me?”

Child (only in thought): “Fine. I’ll go to my room, and I’ll never leave, and I’ll piss on the floor, and I’ll never go to school, and I’ll starve, and I’ll smell so bad, and then you’ll regret it!” !”

Gold…

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

Of course, in the usual flow of family give-and-take, these indulgent revenge fantasies are short-lived; they are quickly displaced by the child’s desire to re-engage with parents, family, and life. Few children actually manage not to leave their rooms again, or never speak again, and so on. But it is the beginning of the thing that counts, and the hope that lies behind 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 of this, is that they can correct perceived parental abuse and incompetence through the use of “industrial action for children,” maliciously complying with what parental authorities say they want, and with what these authorities improperly assert about those in their power.

For example: if you, as a parent, continually nudge your child with the message, “You’re worthless and you’ll never amount to anything,” then your child will be tempted to indulge you maliciously and punish you. -Growing up and not reaching anything, and then you will regret it. However, his son’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, then things will be better for the child and for everyone else in the family. So, in the child’s domain of powerful, nonconscious creativity (the domain of beliefs and decisions), all your child has to do to force you to make things better is to make sure things really, really stay. , really. bad-forever, or until you change, whichever comes first. (For a superbly wince-worthy and humorous demonstration, check out the “soap poisoning” sequences in Gene Sheppard’s A Christmas Story.)

The identity-level unconscious pattern that arises from this transformation from malicious compliance (“I’ll punish you by being who you say I am”) to “beatific compliance” (“I’ll save us all by making you better parents”). it is impressively long-lived. A young child’s identity is powerless in painful and abusive situations, except for two things: the child can control the intensity and duration of his own suffering, nothing more. In desperately suffering families, children are forced to conclude that they can never be good enough, perfect enough, smart enough, etc., to stop mommy and daddy from doing wrong. This then requires the children to resort to their own Plan B of mischievous/beatific compliance: “Dear Mommy and Daddy, I can’t stop you from doing it wrong, but you can’t stop me from keeping it wrong, and maybe even I will.” . it’s worse, so I’m actually in charge of all this horror, not you. I can control how I feel and determine who I am, not you. I will protect you and cover for you. I’ll make sure you don’t. You didn’t hurt me. I’ll hurt myself instead. And I’ll never let this change until you have a chance to develop a little more and make things right, because that’s how I love you.” Malicious compliance thus becomes 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 demonstrated. Some families are lucky enough to be able to show love as love. In other families, love will show up as twisted, twisted, and ugly. Harming ourselves all our lives, by dwelling on a reality in which we are unworthy, ugly, or unsafe, in an unfeasible effort to retroactively redeem our parents and correct our family history, is a profoundly beautiful expression of a love truly ugly.

This is where we return to “The Worst Belief in the World”. As you will remember from our previous article, the worst belief in the world is: “The most dangerous thing I can do is think that I am not in danger.” In addition to having to deal with being hijacked by his brain’s outdated creature-level security pattern, everyone with this “worst belief” is also operating from a delightfully malicious compliance. The mischievous expression is something like: “I’ll show you! If you’re going to make it so scary to be me, I’m going to be scared my whole life! And I hope you’re watching while it happens! And then you’ll be sorry!” The lovingly delicious version is: “Dear parents, if you can’t do anything better than make it totally scary to be me, then in your honor, I’ll keep it totally scary, until you can do better. I want you to be able to be good parents.” It’s not good for you if you’re not a good parent.”

So to revise the “worst belief” we have to update our old pattern of security and move away from the consolations of our equally old pattern of malicious and (arrogantly, nonsensically) loving compliance. The good news is that both these transitions and hotfixes are available. In fact, we all seem to be wired to naturally install these updates as soon as we’re ready, as soon as we want to enable the new experiences.

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

© 2009 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin