Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 15

We all, as babies, entered the world knowing that we had the right to exist. We were there, so we had the right. We were there, and we accepted ourselves. We valued ourselves, so when we felt discomfort we did what we could to look after ourselves. Crying, yelling and thrashing about were usually effective in getting the relief we needed. We did not waste time asking ourselves, ‘Do I have the right to exist?’, and, ‘Dare I ask for anything for myself?’, questions which bedevil and sometimes ruin the lives of a great many adults.

As babies we could not have wasted time on such nonsensical questions because we were too busy doing something else – making sense of what was happening around us and to us.

Making sense of what happens around us and to us is like breathing – something we do every moment we are alive and something we cannot not do. Even when we have dulled our senses with alcohol or drugs, or when our brain has suffered injury, we still go on making sense of everything, even though the sense we make in dreams, or stupor, or confusion is not very sensible.

We start making sense of everything when, in the womb, our little, developing cortex begins functioning as a cortex. In the womb we make some kind of sense of the warmth and darkness, being held and having our needs met, but when we make our journey into light we have a great deal more to make sense of.

When we are born we have to learn quite complex things, like what is close to us and what is far away. However, while we cannot tell whether a round object is a ball close enough to touch or the moon shining through the window, there is something we know straight away. We know what a face is. Indeed, if some psychologist shows us cartoon drawings of faces and other things when we are only five days old, we can tell which are the faces, and we go on looking at them because we find faces the most interesting things in our world.

Faces are the most interesting to us as babies because they respond to us. We engage them in conversation, and we are very good at this when we are babies because we know that we need continuing conversations in the way that we need air, food and water. Conversations are fascinating, exciting, and, in making sense of everything, the most challenging. A rattle is a rattle, but what does Mummy mean?

The process of making sense of everything happening around us and to us can be called the making of meaning. We each create our own world of meaning, and there is no way while we are alive that we can step out of this world of meaning. Even when we say that something is meaningless we give it a meaning, that is, The meaning of this thing is that it cannot be fitted easily into my world of meaning’. We live in meaning like a fish lives in water.

The way we make meaning is that we divide the seamless, moving, changing limitless everything that is into sections. We label these sections, and then evaluate them.

For instance, at present I am looking at the scene outside my window. According to the way I have divided this scene, it comprises trees, and, beyond that, cars and students going by. My division of the scene into trees, cars and students obscures the fact that the trees, cars, students and me are all linked together by a substance I cannot see but can sometimes feel, the air which we each take in, use and let out. The ways in which cars, people and trees take in, use and release air are intimately related in chemical reactions sometimes to their mutual benefit and sometimes not. Moreover, this scene has much more meaning for me than just being made up of objects and people. Everything I look upon has some special value for me. The leaves are turning yellow, and so the scene appears to me to be both sad and beautiful. I am pleased that the old almond tree in my garden has survived an unpleasant disease, and each car and each student suggests a multitude of associations with experiences I have had at other times and in other places.

The meanings we create are not just descriptive and evaluative. They are predictions about what we expect our future will be.

Every time something happens to us, or we do something, we draw a conclusion. Then we use that conclusion to guide us in the future.

For instance, this morning I needed to do some shopping in a particular part of town. I decided to park my car in a garage that I had never used before. Since it was early morning I predicted from the conclusions I had drawn from my past experience of garages that I would be able to park on one of the lower floors. However, when I drove in, I found that most of the floors were reserved for the government offices next door and that I had to park my car on the roof. I drew the conclusion that this was too inconvenient a garage to use when shopping and resolved never to use it again.

Like everyone else, I have been creating meaning and thus predictions ever since my brain started working. Our first conclusion, formed when we were a foetus, must have been, ‘I’m alive!’, though, of course, we drew this conclusion in feelings and images and not in words. The prediction we formed from this conclusion was, ‘I intend to stay alive’, little knowing what dangers would assail us and what stratagems we would have to devise to stay alive. Staying alive was not just a matter of keeping our body alive. Our ‘I’ had to stay alive, for to be a body, however lively, without being an ‘I’ is not to be alive.

We draw conclusions from our first sight of the world that we are born into. My friends, Deborah and Scott, decided that their baby should be born into, not the clinical coldness of a hospital, but the warmth and friendliness of the Birth Center in Philadelphia. As they described it to me, Scott was there, ready to receive the baby when the top of her head appeared. Another push, and Scott found himself being appraised by two steady blue eyes. He was quite sure that he was being assessed, and it was not until the baby decided in a look which clearly said, ‘That’s all right’, that she became free of her mother and was lifted to meet her mother’s astonished gaze and smile. Even when little Hannah was busy nuzzling her mother’s breast, she continued to gaze at her adoring, enchanted parents.

If we are lucky, like Hannah, in our choice of parents and the time and place of our birth, the first conclusion we draw about the world we have entered is that it is warm, loving and ready to meet our needs. We carry this conclusion with us for the rest of our lives, although as we get older we need to modify this conclusion so that it is now. ‘The world is only sometimes warm, loving and ready to meet my needs’.

If we are unlucky, like babies born in times of war and famine or to mothers who are too distracted by their own problems to envelop the baby in love, our first conclusion about the world is that it is cold, hostile and unable or unready to meet our needs. It is hard to maintain our sense of self-worth in such a world, and so a baby drawing such) a conclusion soon loses the self-confidence with which he entered the world. He becomes frightened and, if he continues to feel that he is punished and defeated by a hostile world, he finds that the only way he can protect his sense of ‘I’ is to isolate himself in the prison of depression. Thus many children, born in unhappy circumstances, live their lives in a state of depression.

The cure for such children, as it is for adults, is to help them discover, through experiences of joy, kindness and love, that their conclusion that. The world is always cold, hostile and unable or unwilling to meet my needs’ is just as wrong as the conclusion, The world is always warm, loving and ready to meet my needs’. The first conclusion leads to fear and the second to disappointment.

The conclusion that we need to draw is that the world is sometimes cold, hostile and unable or unready to meet our needs, and sometimes warm, loving and ready to meet our needs, and that we should develop efficient ways of assessing and dealing with the dangers and opportunities that the world presents.

Our biggest handicap in reaching this conclusion is that we do not always go back and check our conclusions. I am certainly not going to visit that garage every week or so to check whether those government cars still have priority. Even more so, when our conclusions are drawn from especially happy or especially sad or dangerous situations, we do not want to go back and reassess. If you as a child have concluded that your grandfather was a great guy you don’t want to look back and see that he was a miserable old man who gave your grandmother a bad time. Similarly, you don’t want to recall the events which made you so frightened of the world.

There is another important reason why we do not want to go back and reassess our conclusions. We don’t want to be constantly reminded how chancy and changeable our world is. We like to feel that some things stay the same.

When we wake up in the morning we don’t want to have to check the conclusion we made years ago that, ‘If it’s snowing outside I’d better put on something warm.’ When we make our morning coffee we don’t want to have to check the conclusion we made as a child, ‘Don’t put your hand in boiling water.’

There also isn’t time to check our every conclusion to see if it still applies to the new situation. Yet we have to use our conclusions constantly to make sense of every new situation and deal with it. It is strange how many people question whether our childhood has any influence on us in adult life. If they thought about it they would realize that:

All we can bring to a new situation is our past experience.

The past experience which we use all the time includes our experience as a child.

So, while we do abandon some of the conclusions we drew in childhood – like believing in Father Christmas or thinking that our 23-year-old teacher is very, very old – there are many conclusions that we never check and which we go on using to make sense of a new situation and to deal with it.

So, just as we, when we wake up, don’t see any need to check the conclusions we drew, years ago, about the weather and clothes, or about taking care with boiling water, so we don’t see any need to check the conclusion we drew about ourselves when we were children.

Now some of us had parents and teachers who were always kind and supportive, and some of us had parents and teachers who were demanding, critical and punitive, some of us had a happy and secure childhood, and some of us had an insecure and unhappy childhood, but, whatever, we each drew the same conclusion about how a child and an adult must try to behave.

This conclusion which each of us drew as a child and which underlies everything we think, feel and do is:

Because I am not acceptable as I am, I must work hard to be good so I can live with myself and not have other people criticize and reject me.

These are my words. Each of us feels, expresses and acts upon it in our own individual way.

We each differ in what we mean by being good.

Some of us would not use the words ‘being good’, but instead think in terms of setting goals and achieving them. Nevertheless, failure seems like badness and weakness. Tom blamed himself when his firm let him go. George sets himself goals in studying the scripture so as to be acceptable to God. Ivan Boesky set himself the goal of gaining great wealth and, while being tried and sentenced for illegal stock exchange dealings, explained, ‘I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’¹⁷

Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of meeting our responsibilities and doing our duty. Nevertheless, failure to meet our responsibilities we see as wickedness. Pat did not think of herself as being good when she nursed her sick parents, but she did feel she was wicked to be angry with her sisters for not helping her.

Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of being helpful to other people. Such helpfulness, as Ruth said, ‘feels good’.

Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of being acceptable to other people. This can mean always striving to be well groomed and properly dressed or, most frequently, always going along with what other people want and never simply pleasing yourself. Lisa, who worried about her appearance constantly, always tried to please other people and considered doing anything to please herself as selfish and therefore wicked. If she did dare to do something to please herself – like eating a cream cake – she felt guilty.

So here we all are, each in our own way, striving to be good.

Most of us are extremely good at being good. We work hard, achieving goals and immediately setting new ones, we meet our responsibilities to others, we consider other people’s wishes before our own, we try to make our appearance attractive, we keep our homes clean and tidy, we strive to be unselfish, unaggressive, kind, loving, loyal, modest, generous, friendly, cheerful, understanding, patient, and punctual, and we try to teach these ways of being good to our children.

Most of us are so good at being good that we generally forget that all this striving to be good is in an effort to overcome our feeling that as ourselves we are not good enough, that we are bad, even evil, and certainly unacceptable to ourselves and to other people.

Nevertheless, if someone comments on how good we are, we must instantly disclaim it. We feel that we have to say, ‘Oh, not really’, and go on to talk about how incompetent we actually are, or how dependent we are on other people, or how we ought to achieve more, or how it is luck and not virtue or competence which enables us to do what we do. A few of us have learned to respond to a compliment with simply, ‘Thank you’, but even then the Thank you’ must be said modestly, lest we be punished by those people who see it as their duty to humble the proud. Thus, no matter how good we are at being good, we can never be good enough.

No matter how good we are at being good, whenever we fail to be good – when we do not achieve our goals, when we make a mess of things, or let people down, or fail to please people, or people criticize, reject or abandon us, or when life does not turn out the way we expect it would – even if we do not directly blame ourselves for our failure, we become aware of a sense of badness and unacceptability. Then we feel very frightened, and we have to strive hard to put things right.

Where does this sense of badness and unacceptability come from? After all, when we were small babies we were pleased with ourselves. We existed, and we did not doubt that we had a right to exist. How was it that later we drew the conclusion that we were bad and unacceptable and that we had to spend our lives working hard to be good?