Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 13

‘Extravert’ here is spelt with an ‘a’ and not an ‘o’, which is the more usual spelling. There is a very important reason for this. It refers to the way we live all the time in two realities.

Our two realities are:

External reality, that is, everything that goes on around us,

and

Internal reality, that is, our internal experience of our thoughts, feelings and images.

These two realities have a quality of realness. They can seem totally real, or less than totally real, right through to not seeming real at all.

To function efficiently we need to perceive both our realities as real and equally real. We need to be sure that, This is what is happening around and to me, and this is what I think, feel and imagine’.

Unfortunately, perceiving both our realities as equally real is not something that comes to us as naturally as breathing. It is something which comes only when we strive to understand the world we live in and to understand ourselves. However, no matter how efficient we become in maintaining our two realities as real and equally real, when we are under stress we find that we retreat to our original position where one reality was more real than the other.

Which reality is the more real relates to how we experience our sense of self and perceive the threat of the annihilation of our self.

Those of us who experience our sense of self as being a member of a group direct our attention outward to external reality. Hence the word extravert, where ‘vert’ is from the Latin ‘to turn’ and ‘extra’ means ‘outward’.

Those of us who experience our sense of self as the progressive development of individuality direct our attention inward. Hence the word introvert, where ‘vert’ means ‘to turn’ and ‘intro’ means ‘inward’.

(The word ‘extrovert’ is often used to mean lively, talkative, sociable, and the word ‘introvert’ to mean shy, quiet, reserved. It is important to remember that many extraverts are shy and unsociable, while many introverts, as I have defined them, are sociable and talkative. If, as an extravert, you do not think well of yourself, you are likely to be shy and unsociable, while, as an introvert, if you have realized the importance of learning social skills, you are likely to be lively and talkative.)

The reality to which our attention is turned seems to us not merely more real but safer and more trustworthy.

Extraverts never doubt the reality of external reality. It is internal reality they find unreal, and they often fear to journey inward. Extraverts who have not confronted their internal reality and made inward journeys of exploration will say of themselves, ‘I don’t know who I am’, or, ‘Inside me is nothing but emptiness’, or, ‘I play roles; I’m never just me’, or, ‘You can go into these things too deeply’, or, ‘I have examined myself too deeply’. The television producer Michael Grade, writing in The Guardian about ‘Me and My Psyche’ said:

I don’t internalize anything. I work and live all my relationships on instinct, which later takes me a long time to work out. Sometimes it doesn’t happen for years. I know something is going on in my subconscious which leads me to make different choices, because life is all about choices of one kind and another, but what finally informs those choices – upbringing, experience, character – I just have no idea … I’m one of life’s pacifiers. I can’t work by diktat, I like consensus, but I’m bad at getting in touch with my own emotional feelings.¹⁶

Their profound dislike of being alone leads extraverts to develop ways of keeping people around them. Needing to be liked, they become extremely likeable and charming. Some extraverts are contented to get by with being charming and agreeable, but many others, wanting to give something of value in return for people’s regard, work very hard and strive to achieve. Extraverts who have some doubts about their own self-worth believe that, if you cannot make people love you, you can make them need you. Helping other people ‘feels good’, as Ruth said, because it makes us feel better about ourselves and it creates a bond between ourselves and the people we help.

Extraverts whose doubts about their own self-worth are even greater, and whose fear of other people is thus as great as their need, people their life with other relationships. They keep pets, or surround themselves with objects like books, pictures, clocks or clothes, or they immerse themselves in a hobby, and in all these activities they turn the animals and objects into human beings. (We all have this imaginative capacity to turn animals and objects which are indifferent to our existence into human beings like ourselves. Doing this can make our world much more comfortable than it actually is, but, equally, we can make our environment seem humanly hostile.)

Sometimes the people to whom the extravert relates are characters from soap operas, or pop stars, or fantasy figures. Often, when ordinary life is boring or unpleasant, extraverts immerse themselves in fantasies. These fantasies always relate to external reality and are tales of daring, glamour and excitement where the extravert is the admired and loved cynosure of all eyes. Thus, in many different ways, extraverts seek to make sure that they never find themselves completely alone. They do all they can to avoid the feeling of their self withering, fading and disappearing.

Introverts never say they have examined themselves too much. Examining themselves is the very stuff of their existence. They may not be examining themselves in terms of id and ego, or how they construct their world of meaning, as we learn to do in the course of therapy. Instead, they may be examining themselves, like George, in terms of their relationship to God, or in terms of their moral duties, or in terms of achieving the goals they have set. Whatever terms they use in this moral inspection, their activity is concerned with setting themselves standards and trying to meet those standards.

Throughout this inward journey of inspection, introverts never doubt the realness of their internal reality. Under stress, when they feel that everything is falling into chaos, introverts feel themselves shattering, fragmenting, crumbling even to dust, but never disappearing. Dust they may be, but dust is still there. Some introverts, when they become depressed, describe their self as becoming ‘two-dimensional’, like a piece of cardboard, but without depth. This is a horrible experience, but the self is still experienced as being there.

It is external reality which introverts find unreal. We (for I am one) look on external reality as being a passing phantasmagoria whose realness and regularity we have to take on trust. Those of us who cope with living have learned to act as if external reality is real. However, we still get tripped up by our doubts.

One New Year’s Eve I was staying with my friends Ron and Diana in New York. They were planning a New Year party, and Ron said he wanted to invite a colleague who he knew lived in the same apartment block. ‘I meet him in the elevator often,’ Ron said, ‘but I don’t know his apartment number. I’ll have to find out from the doorman.’

I was with Ron when he asked the doorman about the apartment number. The doorman searched his list and said, ‘No, there’s no one of that name in the building.’ At Ron’s insistence he checked the mailroom list, and there, too, there was no record of this man’s name.

I was curious as to how Ron was reacting to this. Ron, I knew, was an extravert. When I ventured a question, Ron said, There’s some sort of mix-up. I’m sure he lives in this building.’

‘Do you wonder that perhaps you might have just imagined that you’ve seen him here?’ I asked, knowing that in Ron’s position I would have immediately felt that I had got this bit of external reality wrong.

Ron thought that this was a stupid question, barely meriting a reply. He never doubted the evidence of his senses. Of course he was right about where his colleague lived. The doorman’s list proved to be incomplete.

Introverts like me need extraverts like Ron to keep us in touch with external reality. I was reminded of this a few days later when, as I was preparing to leave the elevator on the fifteenth floor to let myself into Ron and Diana’s apartment, the key slipped from my fingers, teetered on the edge of the elevator floor, and then disappeared down the gap between the elevator and the corridor. Immediately my surroundings became unreal. I could not believe that the key could disappear in this way. I looked at my empty hand, the space where the key had gone, and did not believe it. It was not a matter of intellectually not believing it. The actual quality of my surroundings had changed. I could not be certain where I was or what was happening.

Many introverts when external reality becomes unreal simply do not act. They stay still, or seek the least untrustworthy place they can find, like their own room, and resist other people’s efforts to get them to act, for they dare not risk an action in a reality they do not trust and which might bring disaster. However, what some of us learn to do is to act as if what we see is as it is. This is risky, for we could get things badly wrong, but it does mean that we can have a chance of acting sensibly.

So I acted as if what I saw was real. I went down in the elevator and told the doorman what had happened. He was very kind and phoned the maintenance man to come and let me into the apartment. I waited in the foyer, then chatted with the maintenance man as we went upstairs and he unlocked the door. But all the time everything around me felt unreal, and it was not until I was back in the apartment that my surroundings became real again.

For extraverts, the loss of internal reality is terrifying and disabling. There is a sense of a playing of a role, or many roles, but without an actor, or of an internal emptiness like that depicted in Ruth’s image. One woman told me how she feared to look in a mirror, lest when she did there would be no one there.

Rebecca, an immensely likeable, very intelligent, very successful graduate student, called her uncertainty about her internal reality ‘the impostor complex’, a term popular with graduate students at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Rebecca told me how the impostor complex ‘means somebody who is successful who feels that they are only pretending, that they are going to be found out eventually, that people will discover they’re not as bright or as worthwhile as they’re meant to be. I just worry that I will eventually reach a level where people will just decide that I’m not doing as well as I think I am, or that I’m not as bright as I think I am, or other people said I am. The more time goes on, the more intense this feeling seems to be, the more I seem to accomplish, the more intense the feelings seem to be. I guess it’s just the natural fear of not being as successful as I want to be.

‘Why is it important to you to be successful?’

‘To make myself feel that what I’m doing is worthwhile, that I’m making some contribution, and to make my parents proud of me. To feel that I’m the equal of people around me. I think a lot of it has to do with low self-esteem. I think that people maybe will like me better if I have accomplished all these things.’

‘Why is it important that people like you?’

‘It makes me feel good. It makes me feel unhappy if I think people don’t like me.’

Later in our conversation Rebecca said to me, ‘I don’t feel that I am intellectually all that gifted. I think that (work very hard and I think I am successful because I work hard, and I think I should be proud of it. If I was very gifted and I could learn French or Latin because I had a gift for languages, I’d have no right to be proud of it, but because I work very hard at it I feel entitled to feel proud.’

This comment arose from our discussion about the fundamentalist religion in which Rebecca had been raised. In explaining how many of us grow up with the belief that we have to earn the right to exist, I said, ‘Some of us are taught quite actively that we don’t have the right to exist. There’s a lot of Christian teaching which says that we have to be grateful to God for giving us the gift of life.’

‘That’s how I was brought up. It was that you were nothing and humans were wicked and you were totally unworthwhile. You were supposed to think of yourself as absolutely dead last and everybody else was more important than you were. You had to achieve for the glory of God. What you do is not for your own glory. You don’t even do what you do. God allows you to do it. He gives you the strength to do it. If things were taken away from you this was something the Devil did, or it was God allowing you to be tested. Anything bad happening to you is probably your own fault.’

I commented, ‘You’re describing how, for all you’ve achieved, you haven’t achieved it at all. It’s simply that God’s allowed you to achieve it, and that makes you a kind of impostor.’

However, Rebecca’s Uncertainty about what she had a right to claim for herself was rooted not just in her early upbringing but in how she experienced herself. She said, ‘I feel that a lot of my concern about what other people feel about me, is that I feel I need to know what other people think of me so as to see what I’m really like, that I’m not capable of making an accurate judgement of what I’m really like, that it’s other people’s cumulative judgement that decides what a person is like, what I am like. I just don’t trust my own judgement. I always think that my judgement is going to be skewed because I can’t see how I act. I can’t see how I appear to other people. I worry that I do things not meaning to insult people, but I just act so that they feel insulted and so they don’t like me. I worry that my own perception of reality is not the correct one.’

‘Do you worry about your perception of external reality?’

‘Not too much, no. I can have very definite opinions about what other people are like and make judgements about them, and feel certain that I’m right, but about myself I’m tentative, I guess. I’d like to see how I looked from the outside, because the way you perceive yourself can be quite different from the way that other people perceive you, and I really would like to know how I come across to other people.’

Earlier in our conversation I had asked Rebecca, ‘Suppose you weren’t able to achieve anything and you found that everybody disliked you, what would happen to you?’

‘I think I would get very depressed. When I get depressed I quit eating, I get real lethargic, I sleep a lot, I just sort of break into tears, I wouldn’t be able to function, and I think I would be an unpleasant person to be around. I think many people who know that people don’t like them are unpleasant people to be around. If I became convinced on a long-term basis that I was useless and that nobody liked me, I suppose I could become one of those people who just sort of has a job and doesn’t talk to anybody and has no friends and lives with her cats. If it went on I think I would want to go to sleep and not wake up.’

Now Rebecca said, ‘I don’t know that I felt I never had the right to exist. It was more like, there was no point to existence. It was more like a very empty existence, where nobody cared about you.’

I have written extensively about the different ways in which extraverts and introverts perceive themselves and their world, and I have lectured about this frequently, but, no matter how clear I try to be, I am never dear enough, for quite a few people still say to me, ‘I don’t know whether I am an introvert or an extravert’. (Equally, quite a few people have told me that they know precisely which of my descriptions apply to them.)

Part of the problem is a misunderstanding. I am not talking about types of people, but about different kinds of reasons. Extraverts and introverts can all act in much the same way, but they differ in the reasons for their actions.

For example, some introverts and some extraverts might all dislike being away from home. However, the reason introverts dislike being away from home is that in a new place they do not have the control and organization which they have at home, and the reason extraverts dislike being away from home is that in unfamiliar surroundings, where they have few connections with other people, they are driven into themselves, and this can be disturbing. (This problem with unfamiliar places was pointed out to me by my friend Jo, an extravert, who was about to set out on a journey through Botswana.)

Extraverts and introverts might all want to achieve but extraverts need for achievement is in terms of other people (‘If I achieve other people will not reject me’), and introverts need for achievement is in terms of ‘that’s what life is about’. Introverts and extraverts all want to have good relationships with other people, but introverts need other people to keep them in touch with external reality, while extraverts need other people because ‘that’s what life is about’.

Another reason why some people are confused as to how they experience their sense of existence and perceive the threat of annihilation is that they have difficulty distinguishing what they do feel from what they ought to feel.

My friend Candida described this to me in a letter:

I have just finished reading The Successful Self and want to tell you that I found your book inspiring and challenging but, unlike your others, frustrating too. Frustrating because I found myself lurching from introvert to extravert characteristics! So much of what you said made sense: the expectations of others, for example. My birthday is at the beginning of August and ever since I can remember my mother has told me: ‘You’re a Leo. Leo’s are warm and loving, and such extraverts!’ Or ‘Nonsense, you’re just being silly – Leo’s are full of self confidence’. Can you imagine how I felt at eight, eighteen, or even twenty-eight? Crippled by shyness in the centre of a crowd, but knowing I was supposed to be the centre of attention, I invariably said something stupid and made a fool of myself. If that was being the centre of attention, I didn’t like it! Similarly, I have always been told that I am not musical (my mother, again): ‘We’re not a musical family and you’re tone deaf.’ Hence, no singing lessons or piano lessons at school and whenever I sang at home – in the bath, in my room – my parents clapped their hands over their ears in mock horror. My lack of singing ability is still a family joke. And still, many years on, I wonder whether I can really be as tone deaf as they thought: I love music, especially classical music and opera.

What didn’t make sense in the book was the way I kept wavering between each category, introvert and extravert. I know, for example, that I experience my existence as a member of a group, but I feel I should experience it in terms of individual achievement. Am I a guilty extravert? I can certainly rush around, making myself busy, but I’m also brilliant at worrying about what might happen in the future, looking at every possibility and trying to work out in advance what I’d do. There were so many examples where I identified as an introvert then turned the page to find an extravert characteristic that fitted. Maybe I’m a reluctant extravert who admires, and therefore wants to identify with, introvert characteristics.

Knowing yourself is very difficult when you have always had powerful people around you telling you what they think you are.