Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 17

Whether we are an adult or a child, whenever we find ourselves in a situation where we are totally in the power of other people we face the greatest threat we can ever know. It is the threat to annihilate us as a person. Even if the people in whose power we are are kind to us, we are still in danger, for if they insist that we feel, think and act solely in the ways that they wish then we will cease to be ourselves. We will become an automaton, a puppet, not just a thing, but a no-thing.

To preserve our self we will make all kinds of adjustments and rearrangements. We try to be as disobedient as we dare. No law-abiding citizen is a hundred per cent law-abiding. No one wants to be taken over completely by the government. Some of us in the situation of being completely in other people’s power will decide that if we cannot live as ourselves we will die as ourselves, either in heroic defiance or in suicide.

When there is little we can achieve by action in preserving ourselves, we make alterations to the way we operate as a person. These may not be healthy alterations, but they enable us to survive. In the same way, when our body is starving, we will eat anything which will enable us to survive, no matter how noxious or unpalatable such food may be.

There are many things we can do to ourselves to preserve our self. Frequently we choose one of the following:

We can shut off our feelings and operate calmly, not letting our feelings come through to disturb us, perhaps even denying that we have feelings.

Or we can insist that everything is perfectly fine, and resolutely forget every bad experience inflicted on us.

Or we can split ourselves in two, making one part the person who lives an ordinary life and the other part the person who suffers horrible experiences.

Or we can define ourselves as bad and deserving the terrible things that are done to us.

Shutting off our feelings and operating calmly, not letting our feelings come through to disturb us, perhaps even denying that we have feelings

What gets us into most trouble when we are children are our emotions. If we get angry, we are punished. If we are frightened we are told not to be silly, not to be a coward. If we are envious or jealous, we are told we are wicked. Even when we show our love we can be told that we are soft, or silly, or too clingy and dependent. The only emotion adults encourage us to feel is guilt.

So we have to find ways of keeping our emotions under control. For introvert children, irrespective of what the adults around them might say, emotions pose a particular threat. They are disorganized and disorganizing, and so threaten a complete loss of control. So introvert children need to develop ways of organizing emotions and keeping them under control.

What better way than denying that you feel any emotion?

If you are an introvert you know how readily you can make yourself feel utterly, utterly calm while the crisis rages around you. You may have realized, too, how essential it is, once the crisis is under control or you have a chance to be alone, that you let the emotions out, cry your tears of rage or sorrow, or shake with fear, or curse the instigator of your anger.

However, such calmness can get you into trouble. Extraverts can scorn you for, apparently, having no feelings. Worse, if you never allow yourself to feel and express your feelings you cease to be able to make proper sense of what is happening to you.

By ‘proper sense’ I mean striving to get as close to the truth as it is possible to be. Discovering what the truth of any situation is is always difficult, but we, both introverts and extraverts, make it impossible to get anywhere near the truth if we lie to ourselves.

There are times when for our own safety or for the welfare of others it is beneficial to lie to other people. But,

Never, never, never is it beneficial to lie to yourself.

Unfortunately for us, this is the kind of lie all of us use most frequently.

In times of crisis, there is a world of difference between saying to yourself:

‘I’m going to keep calm. I’ll get upset about this later,’

and

‘I’m not upset.’

The first statement is a recognition of what is happening and a plan for dealing with it effectively. The second statement is a lie, and if we do not let ourselves know what the truth of the situation is we can never deal effectively with the situation.

Neither in our external reality nor our internal reality do things disappear simply because we say they do not exist. When you are about to be run over by a bus, you cannot save yourself by saying, ‘I’m not about to be run over by a bus.’ When you are consumed by emotion, you cannot save yourself by saying, ‘I’m not upset.’

Emotions, like buses, will not disappear when we deny their existence. They go on doing what they are doing whether or not we acknowledge their existence, and, if we do not acknowledge their existence, we cannot deal with them appropriately. Instead, the emotions deal with us in ways which are not appropriate.

Denied anger can burst forth in uncontrolled rage, often against inappropriate objects, like our children.

Denied fear and anger can interfere with the effective functioning of the auto-immune system, and thus make us prey to all kinds of diseases.

Denied fear, anger and murderous hate can reappear in compulsively repeated fantasies which threaten to be acted upon and so have to be guarded against with repeated obsessions. Thus a woman, haunted by the fantasy that she might injure her family, will go on and on obsessively cleaning her house. A man, haunted by the fantasy that he will kill someone, will return, again and again, to a place where he thinks that, while driving home, he has knocked down a pedestrian, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he will not be able to convince himself he has not injured anyone.

In our society, many men, both introverts and extraverts have been taught to lie to themselves in order to become ‘a real man’. The lie which such men tell themselves is that they do not have tender, or artistic, or nurturing feelings, and that they never feel afraid. Thus they feel sex without love, anger without compassion, and, since they cannot feel part of the world and other people through their creative and nurturing feelings, they treat the world and other people as objects to be used and abused. Such men can become politicians, government officials, businessmen, criminals, soldiers, terrorists, torturers, and the kind of scientist who believes that all human experience can be understood solely in terms of chemical change.

Insisting that everything is perfectly fine, and resolutely forgetting every bad experience inflicted on us

If ever you have been in a situation where you have had nothing to do for a long time, like being in bed ill or on a boring journey, you will have discovered how all sorts of memories come back to you concerning events which you may not have thought about for many years, if ever. You can see how, if you gave yourself the time and were not always attending to things in the present and planning, or worrying, about the future, you could recall most of your past life. You might not remember names (psychologists say that the name remembering bit of our brain has a capacity for only about forty names, which was all that we needed when, in our tribes or villages, we met not more than forty people in our lifetime) but the events and people are recalled, and those from childhood come back with exquisite clarity. You can be amazed at just how much you can remember.

It is tremendously important that we remember our past life, because it is our past which gives us our sense of identity. If you woke up one morning and could not remember anything of your past, how would you know who you were? Some people do have this experience of forgetting all their past life, and when they ask someone for help, they do not say. ‘I’ve forgotten how to read,’ or ‘I’ve forgotten how to get dressed.’ They say. ‘I’ve forgotten who I am.’

So we need to remember our past. However, what we remember of our past needs to fit in with what we believe is our identity. There has to be a consistency between the story our past tells and who we say we are. If an inconsistency does occur, which do we change, our identity or our history?

I once had two clients, Annette and Mick. Annette came to see me because she was depressed, and Mick because he was depressed and had had such terrible panic attacks that he hardly dared to leave his house. They had never met, but, as I discovered, they as children had had similar experiences which left them with the dilemma, which shall I change, my identity or my history?

When they were five years old, had they been asked to give an account of their identity and their history, each would have said, ‘I live with my mummy and daddy and my brother who is ten. Mummy and Daddy love us very much and they are always kind.’

Then one day Annette and Mick each saw something which destroyed the consistency of their history and their identity. They saw their father, hitherto a kind and gentle man, become enraged with their older brother and punish him.

Annette described to me how her father had suddenly seized a broom and beaten his son around the head and back, and, when the broom stick broke, he pushed the boy to the ground and kicked him repeatedly. When the mother tried to protect her son, the father pushed her away and she fell against a cupboard and split her face open.

Mick saw his father strike his brother across the face and then order him to take down his trousers and bend over. Then he heard the whistle of a cane through the air, the crack of it against bare flesh, and the cries of his brother, which, as the whistle and crack went on and on, turned to whimpers.

How could Annette and Mick reconcile their identity and their history?

Each scene that they had witnessed was horrible and immensely disturbing. Yet, when I asked, ‘What was it about this scene which made it especially horrible and disturbing?’, each gave a different answer.

Annette said, ‘It was my father going out of control.’ Annette was an introvert.

Mick said, ‘It was my brother being shamed and rejected like that.’ Mick was an extravert.

Annette reconciled her identity and her history by changing her identity. She would no longer respond to events spontaneously. She would get everything about herself, and especially her anger, under control. No matter what happened, she would say to herself, ‘I’m not upset.’ She would keep her father’s anger under control by becoming extremely good and obedient. If he should become angry with her, then it would be her fault.

Thus, whenever Annette remembered the scene, she did not feel the helpless fear and anger with her father which she had felt then. Instead she felt guilt. ‘If I had been really good that wouldn’t have happened.’ Not allowing herself to feel anger lest her rage go out of control, she never defended herself when people treated her badly. She married a man who did treat her badly, and she blamed herself for all his misdemeanours. She lived a life of misery until she could cease telling herself the lie, ‘I am not angry.’

Mick reconciled his identity and his history by changing his history. He forgot that he had seen his brother beaten by his father. ‘It didn’t happen,’ he told himself.

For a lie to be effective it needs to contain a kernel of truth and certainty. I suppose this is why when we lie to ourselves we do so in the reality which is most real to us. Introverts’ lies to themselves are about internal reality – ‘I’m not upset’ – and extraverts’ lies to themselves are about external reality – ‘It didn’t happen.’

Lying to ourselves about events in external reality may make external reality appear to be nice and wholesome, but we cannot deal with emotions by forgetting them. Mick might have forgotten what he saw, but the emotion the scene aroused in him stayed with him. From then on he was afraid of his father and did not know why. In dreams and in fantasies he found himself in situations where he was naked and ashamed, exposed to humiliation and contempt. When, in his thirties, some business reverses and marriage difficulties made him lose self-confidence, the fear of exposure and shame turned into overwhelming panic.

For the first few months in. therapy Mick would say, ‘I had a happy childhood. Couldn’t have had better parents. Do people remember much of their childhood? I don’t.’

Therapists, like generals, have to be lucky, and here I was. Mick was just starting to be interested in his forgotten childhood when his brother, who had left home in his teens and lived abroad, came back for a brief business trip and stayed with Mick. When Mick asked him, ‘Why did you leave home so young?’, his brother told him, and in listening to his brother’s history, the memory of this terrible scene came back to Mick.

Mick’s process of reconstructing a history and an identity was by no means completed by recovering this memory, but the memory was a key piece in a large jigsaw.

Splitting ourselves in two, making one part the person who lives an ordinary life and the other part the person who suffers horrible experiences

Sometimes, the lies we tell ourselves like, ‘I’m not upset,’ That didn’t happen,’ are not enough because the horrible things that happened to us happen not just once or twice but over and over again. Then we might have to resort to a lie which aims to split our self into pieces. This lie is, This is not happening to me. It is happening to someone else.’ Sylvia Fraser found that this was the only way she could deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.

‘When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember ever seeing my daddy naked. I did not remember my daddy ever seeing me naked. In future, whenever my daddy approached me sexually I turned into my other self, and afterwards I did not remember anything that had happened.

‘Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do, the things my father made me do, the things I did to please him, but which paid off with a precocious and dangerous power. She loved my father, freeing me to hate him. She became his guilty sexual partner and my mother’s jealous rival, allowing me to lead a more normal life. She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. Like estranged but fatal lovers, we were psychically attuned. She telegraphed messages to me through the dreams we shared. She leaked emotions to me through the body we shared. Because of her, I was always drawn to other children whom I sensed knew more than they should about adult ways. Hers was the guilty face I sometimes glimpsed in my mirror, mocking my daytime accomplishments, forcing me to reach for a counter illusion: I was special in a good way. I was a fairytale princess.

‘Who was my other self?

‘Though we split one personality between us, I was the major shareholder. I went to school, made friends, gained experience, developing my part of the personality, while she remained morally and emotionally a child, functioning on instinct rather than on intelligence. She began as my creature, forced to do what I refused to do, yet because I blotted out her existence, she passed out of my control completely as a figure in a dream.’²⁰

Of course we cannot actually split ourselves into different selves, dividing like a cell divides into many cells. Such splitting is always as if. All we are doing is not acknowledging all the various aspects of ourselves and their interconnections. We can think of ourselves as being made up of ‘father’s sexual partner’ and ‘me’, or of ‘my dutiful and obedient self’ and ‘my wicked self’, or of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, or of ‘emotions’, ‘thoughts’, and ‘desires’, but indeed every part of us is in continuous and continual relationship with all other parts, and in continuous and continual relationship with our surroundings. If we could remember this we would find it so much easier to experience ourselves as a whole person in close and satisfactory contact with other people.

Defining ourselves as bad and deserving the terrible things that are done to us

(D 6)By telling ourselves the lie, ‘I am bad, evil, unacceptable to myself and other people’, we lay down the cornerstone of the prison of depression.

The business of life is to live, and so all these ways of preserving ourselves are wise and practical things to do in order to survive when we are living under the most terrible threats. If our ancestors had not used such methods of preserving themselves, not just against the devastating things done to them by other people but against the devastating things done to them by floods, droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, plagues, illnesses, accidents and death, then we would not be here today. The human race would not have survived.

What is unwise and impractical is to go on using these ways of preserving ourselves when we are actually not in danger.

Where we get ourselves into a tangle as adults is when we continue using unnecessarily in adult life the self-preserving defences which were so necessary in childhood. We fail to go back and check whether the conclusions we drew as a child still apply in our adult life.

Why do we fail to check our conclusion that ‘I am bad’? After all, believing that you are bad makes you feel guilty, and guilt is a most horrible feeling. It is the fear of retribution, the punishment which you are sure you deserve.