Pg 21 From How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies For Work & Life. Continued from Tuesday’s post. If you’ve not read that, begin there first.
Mayer reported that the North Koreans’ objective was to “deny men the emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships.” To do this, the captors use four primary tactics:
- Informing
- self-criticism
- breaking loyalty to leadership and country
- withholding all positive emotional support
To encourage informing, the North Koreans gave prisoners rewards such as cigarettes when they snitched on one another. But neither the offender nor the soldier reporting the violation was punished – the captors encouraged this practice for a different reason. Their intent was to break relationships and turn the men against each other. The captors understood that the soldiers could actually harm each other if they were encouraged to dip from their comrades’ buckets every day.
To promote self-criticism the captors gathered groups of 10 or 12 soldiers and employed what Mayer described as “a corruption of group psychotherapy.” In these sessions each man was required to stand up in front of the group and confess all the bad things he had done as well as all the good things he could have done but failed to do.
The most important part of this tactic was that the soldiers were not “confessing” to the North Koreans, but to their own peers. By subtly eroding the caring, trust, respect, and social acceptance among the American soldiers, the North Koreans created an environment which buckets of goodwill were constantly and ruthlessly drained.
The third major tactic that the captors employed was breaking loyalty to leadership and country. The primary way they did this was by slowly and relentlessly undermining a soldier’s allegiance to his superiors.
The consequences were ghastly. In one case, a Colonel instructed one of his men not to drink the water from a rice paddy field but because he knew the organisms in the water might kill him. The soldier looked at his Colonel and remarked, “Buddy you ain’t no colonel anymore; you’re just a lousy prisoner like me. You take care of yourself and I’ll take care of me.” The soldier died of dysentery a few days later.
In another case, 40 men stood by as three of their extremely ill fellow soldiers were thrown out of their mud hut by a comrade and left to die in the elements. Why did their fellow soldiers do nothing to help them? Because it “wasn’t their job.” The relationships had been broken; the soldiers simply didn’t care about each other anymore.
But the 4th tactic of withholding all positive emotional support while inundating soldiers with negative emotions was perhaps bucket dipping in its purest and most malicious form. If a soldier received a support letter from home, the captors withheld it. All negative letters however – such as those telling of a relative and was going to remarry – were delivered to soldiers immediately.
The captors would even deliver overdue bills from collection agencies back home – within less than two weeks of the original postmark. The effects were devastating: the soldiers had nothing to live for and lost basic belief in themselves and their loved ones, not to mention God and country. Mayer said that the North Koreans had put the American soldiers “into a kind of emotional and psychological isolation, the likes of which we have never seen.”
Studying Positivity
Moved by this story of psychological torture and deprivation – and perhaps inspired by the hope that these soldiers had not suffered or died in vain – Don Clifton and his colleagues studied decided to study the flip side of this horrific equation. They wondered: If people can be literally destroyed by unrelenting negative reinforcement, can they be uplifted and inspired to greater degree by similar levels of positivity? In essence, they asked:
Can positivity have an even stronger impact than negativity?
Their research to answer this question inspired the Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket. The theory is based on the following principles:
- Everyone has an invisible bucket. We are at our best when our buckets are over flowing – and at our worst when they are empty.
- Everyone also has an invisible dipper. In each interaction, we can use our dipper either to fill or to dip from others buckets.
- Whenever we choose to fill others’ buckets, we in turn fill our own.
The Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket has been investigated, applied, and embraced by millions around the world over the past half century. People who have heard this theory found it to be inspiring and easily applicable in their everyday lives. Most importantly it is a theory you can put to work to make your life better – right now.
In the pages that follow, you will find:
- a simple language to use and share with others
- a summary of research discoveries that are applicable in your daily life
- true dipper and bucket stories
- ways to eliminate negativity from your workplace and life
- five proven strategies for increasing positive emotions
NEXT UP:
Ch Two: Positivity, Negativity, and Productivity