Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 19

When we concluded that we were bad, we immediately set about working hard at being good. We became very obedient. We tried to do what adults told us to do. Not that we were always successful, because adults often make conflicting demands on children and expect them to do what is beyond their powers to do. Of course we did not want to be totally obedient. Whenever we thought we could get away with it, we pleased ourselves in order to preserve ourselves, but often these self-preserving activities were marred by fear of discovery or by our own sense of guilt.

Each of us specialized in a particular way of being good. Gregory worked hard at school and became a great scholar. Pat became very competent in organizing and in looking after people. Tom became a good team man, first in athletics and then in accountancy. Dan became a good achiever and a successful businessman. Lisa became very good at being attractive and pleasing people. Rebecca became a most likeable person and a very successful student. Jill became a very sweet, gentle and competent person. Some of us, having been told by our parents and teachers so often that we were bad, obediently fulfilled their expectations and became very good at being bad. One of my clients, Caroline, as a child was told constantly by her parents that she was both mad and bad, so in her teens she proceeded to fulfil their expectations by having affairs with unsuitable men, losing jobs, and becoming so frightened and depressed that her parents put her into a psychiatric hospital. It did not occur to her that in telling a child that she was mad and bad her parents were treating her cruelly. She just blamed herself.

Whichever form of goodness we chose, we all became very good at being good. This was hard work because we could never stop trying to be good. Occasionally we might take a break, but underneath always was the conviction that ‘Because I am bad, I must work hard to be good’.

Because everything we did was based on the conviction ‘I am bad’, we were left feeling that no matter how hard we tried, we could never be good enough. No matter what we achieved, we would denigrate our achievement. We felt anxious, guilty and driven.

For some of us, the sense of being anxious, guilty and driven was only occasionally present, for we had parents and teachers who set us goals which were in our power to achieve, who encouraged us rather than punished us, and who showed us that they cared about us and would not desert us. Even so, our safety was in the hands of adults, and thus the happiest of us would, from time to time, feel anxious and guilty and think, ‘I must do better’.

Living like this, we could so easily lose heart and fall into despair. (Small children can despair, just as adults can.) We had to find ways of bolstering our self-esteem and giving ourselves hope. We needed to believe, ‘Even though I am bad, I am not that bad, and one day everything will come right’.

Some of us devised a way of feeling better about ourselves by believing, ‘No matter how bad I am, I am better than other people’. Taking pride in our skills at being good, we criticize, gossip about, and reject other people because they have not achieved the standards of goodness which we have achieved. We look at our precisely mowed lawns and say, ‘Wouldn’t you think the family across the street would get their son to mow their lawn properly? We look at our thin, athletic body and say, ‘Wouldn’t you think my sister would go on a diet and get some exercise?’ We look at our quiet, orderly family and our immaculate house and say, ‘We cannot have blacks/Pakistanis/squatters living in this street. They are noisy, dirty and dishonest.’ (Whenever you find yourself at the receiving end of this kind of criticism, remember that the faults that the people are criticizing are not yours but their own. They are using you to overcome their own sense of inadequacy.)

Some of us go beyond simply criticizing and rejecting other people in order to make ourselves feel better. Some of us become very strict and controlling of others, very punitive, even cruel.

Those of us who do this had, as children, prolonged experiences of being helpless and in the power of adults who were inflicting great pain on us.

In families where the parents are very strict and controlling and demand, using severe punishments and sanctions, complete obedience from their children, the child is put again and again in the situation where the realization, ‘I am being punished by my bad parent’, creates such fear that the redefinition, ‘I am bad and am being punished by my good parent’, is not enough to stem the terror. So the child performs a second redefinition. It is:

I am bad and am being punished by my good parent, and when I grow up I shall punish bad people in the way that I was punished.

This is the way that cruelty is handed down from one generation to the next. By inflicting on others a form of the cruelty which was inflicted on us, we deny that the cruelty which was done to us harmed us, and we take pride in our own striving to overcome our sense of badness by punishing those people who could remind us of the circumstances whereby we drew the conclusion that we were bad.

Those of us who did this would, as adults, say, ‘I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm’, not realizing that the harm it did us was in thinking that it did not do us harm. Hence, when the opportunity offers, we can punish our children cruelly, while claiming it is for their own good, and we can work as jailers, policemen, soldiers, concentration camp guards, terrorists and torturers, and feel no sympathy for the people in our power.

Similarly, while some victims of child abuse perform just the first redefinition and believe themselves to be bad, others make the second redefinition, and then, in adult life, claim that, ‘I was sexually assaulted as a child and it never did me any harm’, and go on to do to children what was done to them.

Most of us would say that we hate cruelty and that we do whatever we can to protect and help anyone who suffers cruelty. We may not realize that while we are very good at recognizing cruelty which is far away from us, we are also very good at ignoring cruelty when it happens right before our eyes.

I was running a workshop on the theme of psychological therapy for the major psychoses. Half of the people there knew what it was like to be psychotic, either in the schizophrenic way of an introvert or in the mania of an extravert. The other half were professionals, social workers and psychologists who listened, interested, as the others described their experiences.

At the beginning of the workshop we each described what had brought us to the workshop and what we hoped to get out of it. One young man, Mervin, just said simply, ‘I’ve been allowed out today to come with my friends. I’m psychotic.’

Mervin listened to the discussion and commented, but he often felt restless and got up to wander around the room. In the afternoon he changed his seat to come and sit beside me.

There had been much discussion about the insensitive way people are treated in the psychiatric system. Now I wanted to bring this discussion closer to home, to focus on how the cruel treatment of a child has such long-term effects, and how, while we are very adept at recognizing cruelty far afield and being shocked by it, we are equally adept at neither recognizing cruelty close to home nor being shocked by it.

I began to talk about this and Mervin, as he had done before, interrupted.

‘When I was six,’ he said, ‘I got belted for throwing an ice cream on the floor. I’m the youngest of five, and they all had bigger ice creams than mine. I thought it wasn’t fair, so I threw mine down.’

I put my hand out to pat him. ‘My word, that was a wicked thing for a six-year-old to do, wasn’t it?’

He recognized my irony and nodded. ‘Yes, and then my father picked up his belt with a great big steel buckle and he whacked me with it.’ He drew back his arm to demonstrate how a man would wield a buckled belt, ‘and he whacked me, right across here,’ and he showed how a small child would crumple under such a blow.

Now he crouched forward, his head on his hands. I put my hand on the nape of his neck and stroked him.

‘I love my father,’ he said.

‘How do you feel about this now?’ I asked, thinking it to be a fatuous question, as just the way he crouched there showed the pain.

‘Terrible,’ he said.

Through all this I had been looking at Mervin. Now I turned to the group, thinking that they would want to offer some comfort and support to Mervin.

There was a silence. Then David, one of the social workers, spoke. He was addressing Ingrid who had earlier been describing the inadequacies of the care she was being given. He said, ‘I think it’s very important that the gaps in the service be recognized and that the co-ordination of the delivery of the different services be improved.’ He continued in this vein for some minutes, never looking in the direction of Mervin and me.

Should I, I thought, point out that we were witnessing what earlier I had declared to be so common, our inability to recognize cruelty when it is close to us. Yes, I thought, and did.

The discussion between David and Ingrid went on for some time, but finally there was a pause, and I pointed out what had happened. I said that not only had Mervin shown us his pain, but he had also shown us how children sacrifice themselves in order to preserve their parent as a good parent. All the people in the workshop who experienced themselves as intrinsically bad had, in one way or another, gone through this experience.

There were a father and son in the group, John and Peter, who had each been given the diagnosis of manic-depressive. John told me very firmly that what I had said did not apply to him. ‘I had a happy childhood. It was during the war years, but it was happy even so. And I can say the same for my son. He had a happy childhood. He can say the same for himself, can’t you, son?’

‘Yes, Dad.’ Peter was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. His father could not see his face. As he said, ‘Yes, Dad,’ he grinned and winked at me.

His father went on, ‘Of course I had to chastise him. Parents have to hit their children in order to rectify them. My father hit me, and I had to hit Peter. He needed to be rectified.’

The smile had vanished from Peter’s face. He looked very sad.

Brian, who had organized the workshop, said, ‘Parents can be cruel to children in more ways than by hitting them. My parents used to talk about me as if I wasn’t there. We’d be sitting at the table and they’d be saying, “He did this”, and “He did that”, as if I wasn’t even in the room. Also, they expected me to achieve for them, all that academic success, just for them and not for me in any way at all.’

After the workshop, over a cup of coffee, Ingrid and I talked about her discussion with David. She said, ‘I knew that we shouldn’t have been talking like that, that we should have been paying attention to Mervin. But I wanted to go on talking because I couldn’t bear the pain.’

Whether we remain forever fearful that we are not good enough and painfully vulnerable to hurt and to hurts done to other people, or whether we try to hide our sense of badness by taking pride in our efforts to be good, and criticizing, even punishing cruelly, those who do not reach the standards we have set ourselves, we have, if we are to survive, to give ourselves hope.

We hope that our efforts to be good will be rewarded.

When we were small children we discovered that there was a law of the universe, ‘If you are bad you get punished’. True, there were times when we were bad and didn’t get punished, and sometimes we got punished when we had done nothing wrong, but once we had concluded that we were intrinsically and always bad, we knew that whatever punishment we got, we deserved it. Even if we had not done something wrong, we knew that we could have done something wrong.

Even as small children we were logical, and so we could work out that if, ‘If you are bad you get punished’, is a law of the universe, then its opposite must also be a law of the universe. So we concluded that, ‘If I am good I shall be rewarded’.

Some of us simply worked this out for ourselves, but others of us were taught this explicitly by adults at home, at school and at church. If we had parents who believed in using behaviourist psychological principles in raising us, we got gold stars for cleaning our teeth and lost our pocket money when we answered back. At school we won prizes for achieving and were punished and humiliated for failing. At church and Sunday School we were told that God knew and kept an account of everything we did and thought. Some of us were warned of the tortures of hell fire, and some of us were promised that if we were good Jesus would save us from all harm, but, whatever, the message was clear. If you are bad you will be punished and if you are good you will be rewarded.

The threat of punishment made us frightened, but the promise of reward gave us hope. It was on that hope that we built our life story.

When we were small children learning about badness and goodness, punishment and reward, we were also busy constructing the story of what our life would be.

Our story begins with who we are and where we live, and goes on to tell how we intend to fulfil our ambitions and to be loved by all, or at least by one significant other. It might be, ‘When I grow up Prince Charming will come along and fall in love with me. We’ll get married and live happily ever after.’ Or it might be, ‘When I grow up I’m going to be rich and famous and greatly loved.’

Our story contains, too, scenes where we have our revenge on those who have injured us, and scenes where our true worth shall be revealed and all those who have criticized and humiliated us will be ashamed, astounded and lost in admiration for us. Best of all, there are scenes where we receive an abundance of rewards for all our strivings to be good and for all our sacrifices. Indeed, our whole story is a recompense for what we have suffered in childhood.

In that time when we are creating our story we are also making the greatest sacrifice, short of death, that we can make. We are giving up being ourselves.

In learning to be clean, we had to learn, not just the rules about bowels and bladders, but about washing hands, changing underwear, polishing shoes and so on and on. Left to ourselves we would not have bothered about such things, but to be good we had to give up pleasing ourselves, just as we had to give up pleasing ourselves in order to become unselfish and considerate.

In learning to be responsible and hard-working we had to give up a great deal of our desire to play. It is only in the last fifty years or so that adults have recognized how important play is in a child’s development, but this has led many parents and teachers to become involved in organizing and directing children’s play instead of simply letting children play. The children are directed into learning all sorts of arts and skills, into joining children’s organizations like the Scouts and church groups, and into a highly organized social life. They have no time to themselves, either in blissful solitude or just hanging out with their friends. So while poor children are deprived of the freedom to be themselves in play by the necessity of working, children from affluent backgrounds are deprived of the freedom to be themselves in play by interfering adults who believe that children should always be achieving and improving, that is, being a credit to their parents.

As babies, we laughed when we were happy, cried when we were sad, and yelled when we were angry. As children, we had to give up being ourselves as we learned to hide our emotions. We had to learn not to laugh in the wrong places, to look cheerful no matter how sad we were, and to be calm and quiet no matter how frustrated and angry we were. Since our emotions are spontaneous, learning to inhibit them is tremendously difficult, and so we often failed. The phrase ‘being in touch with one’s emotions’ has become a cliché in therapy because all therapists, of whatever persuasion, recognize that for us to live happily and confidently with ourselves we have to recognize, correctly label, accept and appropriately express our emotions, which is a way of living very different from what we were taught as children.

Again, as small girls, we were shown that we had to give up much of that assertive, active part of ourselves so as to become ‘feminine’. We were told that if we were not feminine we would not be loved. As small boys we were shown that we had to give up much of that gentle, nurturing, artistic part of ourselves so as to become ‘masculine’. We were told that if we were not masculine we would be scorned.

All this sacrifice of ourselves would have been intolerable if we could not, in constructing our story, believe that sooner or later we would be rewarded for all our efforts to be good.