Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ Postcards from me in faraway places with the message ‘Keep worrying’ would make her laugh, but still she worried that I might leave her.

      One day Margaret risked telling her friend Sue about a childish misdemeanour about which she was very ashamed. Sue surprised her by not rejecting her. Margaret told Sue how her schoolfriend Betty had given her twopence to mind but she had spent it. Once she had told Sue about this, and how ashamed she had been when her act had been discovered, she found that the memory of this deed and the shame which accompanied it were not so painful.

      Now she wanted to risk telling me about the greatest crime, the most shameful, terrible deed. But this was not easy. She looked at the clock and said, ‘It’s time to go.’ It was lunch-time, when I had planned to do some shopping, but I sat still and silent. Such a moment for Margaret might never come again.

      Head down, speaking softly, with many hesitations, she said, ‘We lived on the corner, the end of the terrace. Then there was Shirley and Peter, then Betty and her brothers, then Carol and Mary and Ann - they were Betty’s cousins - and then the Smiths, and then my grandmother’s house, at the other end of the terrace. We all used to play together. They all went to the Protestant school and I went to the Catholic school. At school my best friend was Bernadette. I thought she was my best friend. She had a boyfriend, Barry, and I thought I’d like to have a boyfriend, but there wasn’t anyone, only Paul, and he was awful. I didn’t like him at all. He lived in a big house. We used to go there. He used to do things to me. I didn’t like it but I let him. He said I’d like it but I didn’t. We weren’t the only ones, all of them did it - together - all of them.’

      She remembered all their names. A roll-call of former playmates.

      There was one boy, George, he used to tease me, and I didn’t like it. I told Paul and he said he’d get George. He did, he got him, he tied him up and he did terrible things to him. I watched him - I didn’t stop him - and afterwards, when George’s parents found out, and the police came, I saw George’s mother put her arms around him, and I thought, ‘My mother won’t do that to me.’ When I got home, and the police took me home, my mother did put her arms around me, but I knew she didn’t mean it. There was a policewoman and she took me and asked me lots of questions. She asked me who else did it, and I knew they all did but I couldn’t say. She went on and on at me and I had to give her one name. I told her Betty and then they went to see her. Then we had to go up to the police station and there was this policeman there and he told me I was wicked. And afterwards, the parents, they wouldn’t let their children play with me. Betty could play with them but I couldn’t. I’d go and watch them, but I couldn’t play with them. Sometimes Bernadette would let me play with her and her sisters, but if anyone came I had to hide. And if I had to go down the street to my grandmother’s, they’d all call out to me, say things to me, it was terrible. They never played with me, not ever again. And they told other people about me. When I went to secondary school, some of the boys from the boys’ high school knew, and they’d say things. That’s why, when I left, I went right away. But I’m always frightened they’ll find out where I am and they’ll tell people and I’ll lose my job and nobody will talk to me.

      She was crying. I gave her a tissue and said, ‘That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard. That poor little girl.’

      Margaret did not believe me. For her the shame was never ending.

      But the pain for Margaret was not simply the shame she continued to feel for a misdemeanour the like of which many children at that age commit. If it is not sexual exploration it is stealing, or joy-riding, or, more dangerously, glue-sniffing. It would be a rare adult who could put their hand on their heart and swear that between the age of six and sixteen they had never broken the law or transgressed the moral code. For Margaret there was a greater problem.

      One day she took me to task for never using her name when I was talking to her. I had to admit this. My style was never to use the name of the person I was talking to except when I wanted to attract their attention. I apologized to Margaret, and asked her why it was important that I use her name.

      She said that it showed that I had not forgotten it and thus had not forgotten her. She told me how she felt that when she vanished from a person’s sight she vanished from that person’s memory. Whenever she returned to work she was surprised to find that the people there remembered her.

      I said, ‘I always remember who you are when you arrive,’ and she responded, ‘That’s because you’ve written it in your diary.’

      It was not just that she believed she was so insignificant that people did not remember her. Behind her anxiety was the fear that if everyone forgot her then her existence would cease. Most of the time she knew that believing that she existed only because other people thought of her and that she could vanish at any time was nonsense, but being left alone and forgotten was a fate she dreaded. Shame may have made her want to hide away, but shame also gave her the feeling that other people were observing her, and their gaze meant that she continued to exist. Shame strengthened her sense of existence and so she dared not relinquish it.⁸

      In 1985 I wrote this story in the present tense. Now it must be told in the past tense, because for many years Margaret has led a happy life. She now has her own home and a loving partner, and she travels extensively worldwide. I have told the story of how she took charge of her life and changed in my book Breaking the Bonds.⁹

      Many of us define ourselves in terms of our sense of guilt. A feeling of impending punishment can hang over us, like a Damoclean sword, ready to smite us for deeds done or which we have failed to do. While shame relates to our identity, the person that we are, and guilt to what we do, we can come to believe that everything we do is wrong and that we can never do anything properly, so that a sense of guilt, a pervasive sense of fear, can absorb our being to the extent that it becomes one of the structures by which we define ourselves. If we did not feel guilty we would not know what to do. As Constance once said to me, ‘I was born guilty’.

      Some children acquire this sense of guilt when they come to feel that it was their fault that their mother died or their parents split up, even though these events occurred when the children were far too young to understand them. Most of us acquired our sense of guilt when, as small children, we found ourselves locked in combat with a parent over where and when we should defecate, or whether and what we would eat, or because our parent was punishing us and we did not understand why. We defended ourselves with anger and protest against a parent whom we saw as interfering and unjust. However, we could not win the battle and bring it to an end. We went on battling, and, as we did, we recognized that the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. We felt very keenly that our parent was wicked to do this, but if that were so it meant that the person on whom we depended was wicked. This was terrible. We had to find some way of making ourselves safe.

      Our solution was to accept our parent’s definition of the situation. Power is always about who does the defining and who accepts the definitions. So we acquiesced. We decided that we were wrong to see the situation as ‘I am being unfairly punished by my wicked parent’. The correct way to define the situation was ‘I am bad and am being justly punished by my good parent’, which was how our parent saw it.

      This acceptance of our parent’s definition may have extricated us from that dangerous situation, but the price we paid was a lifelong sense of guilt. The sins of commission and omission became an integral part of our relationships with others and, knowing our badness, we have to strive to be good. Or else what will happen to us if we are not good? We shall be punished and abandoned.

      This, as small children, is what we feared most of all, that our parents would abandon us and leave us alone, weak and defenceless in an alien world. We СКАЧАТЬ