Mute to Rhetorician

According to my Mom, I was born mute.  I just didn't talk until I was three or so, and even then, I barely used more than a word.  My parents took me to get tested, and I gather my doctors went through a series of diagnoses.  Autism was the "real" one, but the doctors went with aphasia because my father's health insurance would pay for speech therapy if I had that as a diagnoses.

But the treatment wasn't all that successful, so they decided I needed to be institutionalized: this was in the late 1960's, when being put away for life was still a way of treating mental patients.  I have the documentation still, showing my intake date and all. By then, they were back to autistic, I believe.

My mother just didn't like the idea of having to spend the money to put me away, so she enrolled me in pre-school.

I was making sentences within a week.  Mom found it so "cute" that all it was was that "no one was talking to me, so I didn't understand the need to talk back".  (My mother probably had Narcissistic Personality Disorder, or so a counselor speculated after much work with me in my 30's.  The drain on the family budget pushed her to find a new way of dealing with me, and I was spared being raised by a mental institution.)

But I hadn't been talking much, if at all, for years.  Words, and the actions needed to make words, would now be always a struggle for me.

I have a clear recollection of my first grade teacher saying to me that "in my 26 years of teaching, I've never had a student as dumb as you." She said it across the whole room, so everyone heard.

I would have been about six years old at the time, I was failing first grade, and I had been using sentences for less than a year and a half.  Repeatedly during my K-12 years, I was forced to accept that I'm just not that smart.  I had to go to summer school. I had years of speech therapy. I was nearly placed in the classes for the mentally disabled kids (oddly, that was most seriously considered because it would get me away from other students who were bullying me).  My teachers, especially the Reading / Writing ones, despaired of my spelling and grammar. I was made to take Home Economics and Shop because I clearly wasn't going to college.  I even was made to trade those classes for the sciences classes I wanted to take.  (My math scores were seen as a fluke, and a girl child can't do math based careers: ah, the sexism in 1970's little city America.)

Twenty four years, and a few months, after my first grade teacher bewailed my performance, I graduated with my PhD in Rhetoric from an English department.

Sometimes, rhetoric backfires.  All those messages should have kept me in my place. All the craziness at home should have broken me.  The goal was to keep me in the category my teachers and family had already put me in.  I was the poor idiot, the unwanted child. Nobody likes to have their expectations disrupted, and me being mentally imcapable had become an expectation.

My story isn't unique: the story of the person overcoming other people's negative expectations has become a trope.  We see the failure of bullying put-downs--of negative rhetoric--as a success of the human spirit. And certainly, it is such a success.  We are reminded that we can be more than the words that shape our culture and our lives.

But wait a minute, what does this mean for rhetoric itself? The rhetoric techniques seem to have backfired.  When we hear negative rhetoric--from political campaigns to cable news to interpersonal communications--we think about how it does, or does not, effect us.  Well and good.

But we also need to recognize that the rhetoric itself just failed, not just that we succeeded.

What if all those negative messages weren't ones that lead to failure, but we just assume they will because they seem to us that they should?  What if some sorts of repeated negative rhetoric actually encourage people instead?

Did my first grade teacher actually plant the idea that I needed to be smarter, so I worked to become smarter? Did she do me a favor, as well as abuse me, without even knowing it?

We need to be less self-centered when we study rhetoric.  By only seeing its failure in the context of our successful self-affirmation, we miss a chance to understand all of what happened.

To understand why bullies fail to break our spirits, we need to assess the rhetoric used. We need to look for patterns of similar rhetorical use, and we need to see if that specific sort of negative rhetoric results in a statistically significant pattern of long-term positive outcomes.

We need to not only celebrate the human spirit that rejects the bully's words, but to learn if some sorts of a bully's put downs are, in actually, a malicious way of lifting someone up.


Edit on June 30.  Oh, hey, thanks to a Forbes article, I found a study that's sort of relevant. Not surprising, someone did do a study of how positive rhetoric improved children's performance while simultaneously undermining the opposing group.  Here's the link http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22496180   Now, I'm still looking for a study that explores when negative messaging creates positive outcomes, especially over the long haul.