Domination in a social setting seems quite important to many people, according to my observations. In Japanese culture, dominance is assigned according to an hierarchy of gender, age, position, class, income and race. In Australian culture, however, the boundaries are not just blurred, but fluid.
This creates a complex of problems. Not only are interactions fraught with personal-professional challenges, there are constant threat cues from the environment about protecting one’s perceived social, personal and professional status.
I’ve being experiencing incredible reverse culture shock since I arrived back in Australia after living in Japan for 20 years, and I believe I found one way to parse my observations.
Transactional Analysis (TA) identifies three roles for how people interact:
1. The Parent is the domineering person who commands, decides and gives answers to the Child
2. The Child is the person who capitulates, submits and abdicates responsibility
These two roles are extensions of our personal childhood experiences. The Parent is the role of the adults in our lives growing up; the people from whom we learned to behave. The Child is the way we responded to those adults.
TA stipulates that we internalise the values and language of those adults as Parent, our inner Parent, and are the voices we listen to in our heads. The Child, then, is the behavioural and emotional constellation of our responses. It is also how we respond to the Parent’s voices, even as adults.
3. The Adult is the mediator between the Parent and the Child and the ‘consummate professional’ in a business environment. The Adult is the person who seeks resolution and finds balance, and who takes responsibility.
Through TA therapy, we eventually establish our inner Adult. We learn to mediate our conflicting drives and address our pain and fears suitably. Many have an inner Parent who is nurturing but for those of us who do not, establishing our Adult is paramount to a healthy psychology.
Returning to dominance in social situations, which also means professional situations, Australian society has no formalised hierarchy. Where people have not had specific training for their position, regardless of profession or position, we can only rely on what we have.
As a result, I’ve seen many people who are insecure in their positions. As such, they find threats where none are present. I never experienced this in Japan and my repeated experiences of this in Australia are still a great challenge for me. The icing on the cake is the way that most Australians I’ve met are complete adverse to taking responsibility for anything.
Awful mixed messaging.
A D R A N 