Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ through a long, dark night and no one came to comfort us, or our mother left us with strangers and did not return for a long time. We heard the threat of abandonment when our parents told us of bad children being sent to children’s homes or of parents being driven to leave or even to die by their children’s wickedness. The most loving of parents can say in a moment of exasperation, ‘I can’t stand you a moment longer,’ or ‘You’ll be the death of me.’

      Threats of abandonment do not diminish as a child gets older. A friend told me how, when he was nine and causing his mother some bother, she had packed a bag with his clothes and ordered him out of the house. He spent the day sitting at the front gate, hoping to be let back in again and promising to be very good. He is a man of unsurpassed goodness.

      The fear of abandonment can underlie the whole of our experience of our existence, and because it is always there, allowing no contrast with periods without it, we do not conceptualize it clearly and consciously. Thus we do not ask why we have this fear now and whence it came.

      Lorna had a nasty, life-threatening disease, cystic fibrosis, but she showed that by bravely and sensibly following a strict health regime this disease need not cut short one’s life nor prevent one from leading an ordinary existence. She had had to give up her work as a nurse but she had a loving, supportive husband, a wonderful daughter, a pleasant home, and a strong Christian faith which assured her that there was no reason to fear death. She could not understand why she should wake during the night consumed with panic, nor why a black depression should immobilize her in a way that her illness never did.

      Nor could she understand why her GP wanted her to talk to me. But she dutifully came along, and discovered that talking to me gave her something important that was missing from her life. At home she was addressed as wife, mother, daughter, daughter in-law. Nobody talked to her. Now she had found someone who talked to her as her.

      We talked about many things - the worry of her illness, the peculiarities of the medical profession, the responsibilities she carried for her family because she had always been the ‘sensible, well-organized, reliable one’. We talked a great deal about her need to do everything perfectly. Visitors had to be entertained with hot meals and home-made cakes. The garden must be trim and neat, the house immaculate. ‘I wouldn’t dream of going out and leaving the washing up not done or a bed unmade,’ she said.

      I argued that she should let visitors fend for themselves and that housework should be kept to a minimum so that she had time and energy to do things which she found interesting and pleasant. At first she was doubtful, but one morning she told me, with triumph and laughter, ‘I went to church on Sunday without making the bed first but I closed the curtains so the neighbours couldn’t see.’

      Why did she set herself such high standards and always strive to meet them? True, she had a mother who always expected her daughter to be perfect and a credit to her, but why had she accepted the enormous demands that her mother made on her?

      One day, when she was telling me how fiercely she resisted going into hospital whenever her illness produced some complication, and how miserable she felt when she was there, she mentioned going into hospital when she was a child. I asked her about this and she described how she had been sent to a hospital when she was about seven. It was housed in a castle and run with military efficiency. Parents were not allowed to visit and children had to do what they were told. They had to be neat and tidy, obedient and reliable, and there were punishments if they were not. When her parents left her there she dared not cry because her mother disapproved of tears. She thought that she might never see her parents again, but when, at last, after many months, she did go home, she worried that she might be sent away again, to be abandoned and alone. So she tried very hard to be good.

      Until we talked about these events in her childhood and uncovered the meaning they had for her, Lorna had not seen the connection between these childhood experiences and her drive for perfection, her fear of hospitals and the terrible panics which came whenever she felt that she was completely and absolutely alone. Buried farther was her anger towards her parents, who had abandoned her in the hospital, and towards her family, who expected her to give up being herself and to be what they wanted her to be. She had not acknowledged this anger, lest it burst forth and her family, who would not tolerate anger, reject her.

      In the womb we were securely held. Being born brings us the first experience of being abandoned. We are no longer confined within secure limits, and instead a limitless world stretches around us. This uncertainty is frightening but necessary. All through our lives we cannot change anything about ourselves unless we go through a period of uncertainty. If we are wise we teach ourselves to tolerate the uncertainty of change, but, even as we do this, we retain the longing for the comfort and security of being securely held.

      The ways in which this need can be met range from being physically held to knowing ourselves to be an accepted and loved member of our group. Important though this need is to all of us, there is no word for it in English. The closest word is ‘dependence’, from the Latin ‘to hang from’, but in our society to be dependent is not an admirable quality. Only weak, despicable people are dependent; strong, admirable people are independent. So we have to keep hidden our longing to be held secure in loving arms.

      Not so in Japan. The Japanese language contains an important word, amae, which has the root ‘sweet’.¹⁰ Sweet it is to rest secure in loving arms. Sweet it is to amaeru, to presume upon the secure and indulgent love given by another person. It is that sense of snuggling up, of coming home, not to shouts and yells and coldness and criticism, but to welcome, allowed to be yourself and knowing that the people around you accept you as you are. The toddler who climbs on to an adult’s lap, confident of a cuddle, the teenager who throws his dirty football shorts on the bathroom floor, confident that they will reappear in his drawer, clean and pressed, the wife who snuggles up to her husband in bed and confidently places her cold feet on his - all amaeru. We all long to amaeru, but so often we cannot do this. Sometimes we have no one to hold us, and sometimes the people who hold us do so too tightly and threaten to smother us.

      Adults who care for babies need to find a balance between keeping the baby securely held and allowing the baby the freedom to stretch, kick and act upon the environment by exploring it. In western Europe until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and to this day in eastern Europe, babies were wrapped tightly from birth in swaddling sheets to form a rigid bundle and left tightly held, but not in human arms, for the first six to eight months of their life. The theory behind swaddling was, according to the historian Lloyd de Mause, ‘If it [the baby] were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified at the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl on all fours like an animal.’¹¹

      Nowadays good mothering practice includes both tucking the baby securely in a cot or carrying him in a sling held firmly against the adult’s body and freeing the baby from all physical restraints in a warm, safe environment. These two kinds of condition are necessary for the baby, not just to encourage physical growth and health but to help him develop as a person who can tolerate the closeness of being in a secure group and the uncertainty of being an individual acting upon the world.

      Unfortunately, some parents believe that they must teach the baby that they and not the baby are in charge, and so they do not respond to cries of hunger or distress. Some parents are too tired, or too busy, or too depressed to play with or talk to the baby. To learn, to develop our intelligence, we need to be able to act upon the world. Doing this, we develop the idea that ‘I am the kind of person who can act successfully upon the world’.

      The idea ‘I am the kind of person who can act successfully upon the world’ is one of the possibilities that can be contained in an individual’s sense of being a person. If I asked СКАЧАТЬ