I am going to briefly present to you a subject which is vast, heavy and charged, which is one of the subjects on which we are working at the Orphéeé network: bullying at school . I will approach it from the angle of a concept: symmetrical climbing and complementary climbing . This notion we owe to Gregory BATESON we find them in the book “ Towards an ecology of mind ”.
Why am I leaving here? Because most of the time in harassment issues, we see further escalations; there are exceptions which I will discuss.
COMPLEMENTARY CLIMBING
Why this additional escalation? because when we are harassed by someone, when we are mistreated, we believe that, by being more and more kind, more and more submissive, more and more docile, more and more conciliatory, more more helpful, more and more discreet or even more invisible, we will manage to make the harasser calm down and become respectful.
This is an error that is often fueled by the attitude of the stalker, who can suggest that when you crash a little, he becomes nice again.
But this is false since he simply takes advantage of this very short latency time, to give the illusion that it works and then, to start again in an escalation of violence.
Complementary escalation is a mechanism where two interlocutors or two poles of the relationship have opposite and complementary behaviors.
On one side there is domination for example, on the other side, submission, this is the case in harassment.
SYMMETRICAL CLIMBING
There is also another type of escalation: symmetrical escalation where the two poles of the relationship have exactly the same behavior, or similar behaviors. In this case, we believe that to stop the violence of the other, we must go even further than the other, by shouting even more, by arming ourselves even more than him.
So we are caught in an escalation that is gaining momentum that goes as far as the explosion of the system.
In both cases we end up with the explosion of the system, ie something that can be very dangerous.
Today, I am going to delve a little deeper into the case of complementary climbing since it is the most common scenario, and the most classic scenario that we encounter in schools.
I specify for those who do not know the school of Palo Alto well, that what we call the client is the one who is ready to pay the price of the change, since the school of Palo Alto works in a systemic way, we look in the system at where the best lever for change is and we look at where the demand is.
The best lever for change is where there is a demand for change.
So in a problem of bullying, very often the usual attempt at solutions by institutions is to try to impact the bullying child . So we're going to punish him, lecture him, sanction him, push him away, but he's not a client at all, he has no problem.
On the other hand, the harassed child has a problem, he suffers but that does not mean that he is a client since he initially feels completely helpless.
So he is first of all complaining, and we will have to effectively use strategic communication to win him over, to mobilize him. The therapist uses strategic communication with the child to show him that he can have power over the interaction. We can show that with different methods depending on the age of the child of course, for example by telling him a few little children's stories to show him how we work.
It can be by offering him a solution from the outset to see how he reacts, while telling him that it is of course too early for him to put it in place and that first we must see all the risks that 'There is.
It can also be by telling him that he has no choice, sometimes in situations you have to be a little more brutal.
You have to be able to show him that it's possible in any case, that his horizon of possibilities widens and that he can manage to say: "I can finally have an impact on the relationship even if for the moment I don't feel not ready, but it is possible. »
Secondly, you have to get him to be ready for that on an emotional level because being a customer means being able to pay the price of the change. Any change is paid for: in risks, in renunciations, in inconveniences.
We have to manage the emotions of these children who arrive with fears, fear, shame, great anxieties, and we also ask them to make an effort, we ask them to bear the price of change. It's very heavy so we absolutely have to work on these emotions.
One of the emotions is the fear of risk since they say to themselves: no, but it's not possible, I can't confront this stalker, he is too powerful, he is too validated by others...
You have to help him through that, by imagining: well with him, if you did that, what exactly would he do? And by trying to concretize the interactions as much as possible and possibly asking him to imagine that without doing it. It is a work of therapy to learn to confront your fear and see it diminish in intensity.
Sometimes it's more work on renunciation that needs to be done to help the child to be able to give up an abusive relationship and therefore to accept a form of loneliness.
This is extremely important basic work which allows at some point to have a child who is a client, who wants to do the tasks given to him and who nevertheless changes his posture, who sees his emotions change. , which changes his vision of the world.
Strategic communication with the child is to allow him to change his posture, to change his vision of the world.
How to get out of this additional escalation?
We arrive at the second stage which is to get out of this complementary escalation and to allow it, instead of going down more and more in the low position, to go up in the high position.
For him to be able to do that, when faced with his stalker, we really have to give him the methods in an extremely precise way : the words to say, the attitudes to have, we have to guide him in all these steps because it's very difficult to TO DO.
It's like a soldier who is going to fight on a battlefield so he needs a lot of courage and to give him sufficiently reassuring means, knowing that to defend oneself strategically consists in using the content of the aggression to build then a cropping that makes the aggressor uncomfortable.
So if we use something other than the content of the aggression, if we attack the harasser with something other than the content of the aggression, we risk making a mistake and being blamed ourselves.
Moreover, to help him get out of the complementary escalation, well, sometimes you just have to, as we said, help him give up the relationship, sometimes it's a mix of the two. This work of renouncing the relationship is a job that we do not only in the office, but for which we also accompany the child in his relationship with the bully since the bully will often try to keep the child in the relationship because useful to him.
There is a case, which is quite frequent, where the problem for the child is also the attitude of these parents . That is to say, the parents are so mobilized to save their child from abuse, that the child no longer wants to be a client himself.
Parents take up too much space they are customers in their place, there are generally two scenarios:
- there are the parents who act directly on the aggressor, who will scold the child in question, who will make a phone call to the family, who themselves will often be quite aggressive. In this case, most of the time, the child is uncomfortable because he feels that it's very bad practice to do that, that it devalues him. He will shut up and he will say nothing more to his parents and therefore we have a child whose sufferings we do not even know anymore. When the child manages to rely systematically on his parents or on adults in general to get him out of trouble, he finds it difficult to be mobilized himself.
- there are those parents who have heard of the fact that you have to get out of the complementary climbing by taking up a high position. So they send their child the injunction to defend themselves...
These parents unfortunately do not help their child at all. The injunction translates “I know better than you, so you have to do this. This is an extremely demeaning statement by doing this, the parents unfortunately enter into the same system of abuse as the stalker himself.
When the parents make this kind of attempt, despite all the love they have for their child, they participate in his suffering and, in this case, it is necessary to work with the parents so that they completely stop doing that and even if they do the opposite.
THE CASE
I will tell you a little story knowing that it is a possibility of achieving symmetrical climbing but it is not the only one:
This is the story of Lucie who has an older sister whom we followed for a problem of harassment, and therefore who learned with us how to defend herself against her attacker in a strategic and effective way, and who told her little sister: "no worries, you'll see, we'll blow her nose and then she'll stop hurting you like that".
And so, they began to imagine ways to counter the stalker, who will be called Manon. Suddenly Lucie entered into such a symmetrical escalation with Manon, that the boys in her class had fun counting the points between them. Except that it was always Lucie who was the loser, so she didn't gain much and above all she found herself very isolated because Manon didn't have a lot of charisma elsewhere.
It should be known that Manon mistreated Lucie by essentially slandering her and saying that she was unreliable, that she was a liar and that she sought to take advantage of people… Lucie was stuck in a symmetrical escalation, he absolutely had to go back down to the bottom position.
And to get to understand what to do, we really had to go back to a kind of original scene between Manon and Lucie, which she had to look for by strategic questioning with Lucie because she didn't really want to go there. to come back.
In fact, about a year before that, Manon, during a small meeting with the girlfriends, had said, looking Lucie in the eye: "I wonder deep down if I don't prefer girls" and Lucie had taken a horrified, disgusted look, well, that had scared him. From that moment Manon became abusive with Lucie.
So once we were able to have this element there, we simply asked Lucie to go and apologize in fact, about this scene and say to Manon: "I understand that you fear me and I simply wanted tell you that I'm not proud of what I did that day. »
In this case, that was enough to calm Manon down completely.
It's a very specific story, I don't like being generalized, and I would conclude by saying that ultimately you have to be very careful about the rigidity of the protocols, you always have to keep all the finesse of the investigation of the problem with an anthropological approach.
