There is a huge disconnect in this day in age when it comes to RESPECT. And I mean respect for elders and respect for others in general. We always hear “Back In the Day;” however, this sentiment doesn’t hold much weight anymore. Soooo much has changed, from technology, to schools, to music, to life at home with parents, etc. I cannot name one thing that is the same from “Back In the Day.” Change is inevitable. Everyone doesn’t accept change, and maybe that is part of the problem. One thing that I have realized as I have aged is that the next generation always seems to over-compensate for the mistakes of the last generation. Read that again if you need to.

If I start at my great-grandmother’s generation, they grew up in a time where they were still fighting for their rights as Black citizens. They bought blocks of ice, milk, and vegetables from a man on a truck, they sent messages through the “snail mail,” and they did not tolerate any means of “back-talk” from anyone, especially not children. Children were to be seen and not heard. Respect for elders was not up for debate, as children were brought into this world, and could be “taken out” at any given moment. They proved that sentiment through punishment. Unfortunately, the same/similar types of punishment that the slaves endured from their masters (that is for another blog though). That generation over compensated when it came to this idea of respect. They couldn’t make the “white man” respect them, so they forced whatever respect they could attain on their children. Some of this same thought pattern resonates even today in certain households. We are the products of our environment, our experiences, and even the patterns of how our bodies have learned to react to stimuli. In my family, my grandmother was always taken care of (from what I knew about her). She had her mother, and then she had my mother. Oddly enough, my grandmother cared less for respectability politics. She said what she wanted, when she wanted, and wasn’t apologetic for it either. Oddly enough, that was the part I respected the most about her. She spoke her mind. And I would venture to say that she was overcompensating for massive respect she had to endure by refusing to be respectable. Now, my mother on the other hand. She was all about respectability politics, and still is to this day. I thank God for every lesson that she provided me, but she demanded a certain level of respect through punishment, and not just for herself, but for any elder that was in my presence. There was no such thing as “talking back,” “speaking my mind” as a child, nor any level of autonomy in decision-making. All my decision-making skills came from her having to work so often that it was me and my sister left to be independent and follow the rules, or else. While at home and in public it was a mandate to be on our best behavior at all times. However, this led to a lot of sneaky behavior (at least for me) when she wasn’t around. I didn’t always make the best decisions, but what I did have was respect for my elders, but not always for myself. My mother overcompensated to the point that I was an adult before I was able to honestly tell an adult “no” and feel “ok” about it.

The point here is that there seems to be no “happy medium” of what respect is “supposed” to look like. As we view the headlines of the news day after day there is more and more issues of people not being able to agree on anything, and even students picking fights with teachers, which leads to teachers full on fighting teenagers in the classroom out of self-defense. And these scenarios are only after the idea of guns being the only way to solve a problem. As I sit back and think about how we got to this place as a society, I can see the trauma wrapped up in all of it. Generations upon generations that have all gone through adverse childhood experiences with no type of therapy, and everyone just winging life through the lens of the past.

As we approach an age where mental health has a big shiny light on it, I can only wonder if there is an overcompensation going on now too. My generation has rejected so much of the past that we have forgotten to keep some of the lessons that are actually helpful. We spend so much time un-learning the negative patterns and refusing to be our parents that we have rejected the very lessons that helped to get us to this place of vitality that we are in now. Let’s take the incident of the fight at school with the teacher, the student, and the cell phone. It is obvious that the student has little to no respect for her elders, and the questions is where did that come from. While we can’t automatically say her parents because that isn’t fair, it absolutely does come from learned behavior though. Somewhere in her life that student has learned that it is ok to disrespect someone older than you in any setting when your “rights” are being violated. That sounds familiar doesn’t it. The news is full of stories of black individuals that “railed against the system,” and are respected for it, despite the things that they endured for doing it. Whether we like it or not, the children are watching, and sometimes they aren’t learning what we hope they are from our experiences. Now, what about the teacher. Well, this appears to be a cause of the teacher’s autonomic nervous system taking over, and her instinct of “FIGHT” coming into play. I would venture to guess that there is a pattern of behavior in that teacher’s past that whenever she has been threatened in such a way, her reaction has been “FIGHT” and not “FLIGHT.” We are all wired differently, and while it is easy to say that her role as a teacher should have stopped her from engaging, it isn’t that easy when your body makes the decisions for you based on the memory patterns in your nervous system.

Whether we like it or not, there are patterns that our bodies learn and take control in certain situations. Unless you have become aware of those patterns and actively seek to change them by regulating your nervous system, you will continue to maintain those same patterns of learned behavior. This reigns true for our traumas especially. Our bodies are meant to help us in times of fear and danger; however, our bodies learn a pattern and stick with that pattern, whether that pattern continues to serve us in adulthood or not.

So where does this leave the idea of RESPECT. Well, from what I know now, I would say that the current generations choose who to respect based on relationship to that person, and if that person has shown respect back to them. Therefore, respect has become something that is solely earned and not automatically given freely, specifically in the US (more like the Divided States now though). Respect is now tied to our feelings about that person, not the age of a person. And the more that is a reality, the more we will see our bodies making RESPECT decisions, instead of our hearts.