Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ structure can reorganise itself in a way more in keeping with what is actually going on. If we do not understand that we are our meaning structure, then when the unexpected happens we feel ourselves falling apart and are terrified lest we be annihilated as a person. Not understanding, we build up all kinds of defences to hold ourselves together when we feel ourselves in danger of falling apart.

      The tool we use in building these defences is a very cunning one and represents one of the functions of the meaning structure. It is the tool of pride. How pride functions has interested me for quite a long time.

      By the late seventies, through listening carefully to what depressed people were telling me, I realised that the essence of depression was the sense of being alone in some kind of prison where the walls were as impenetrable as they were invisible. I could see that the depressed person had certain attitudes or beliefs which served to cut him or her off from other people and from everything that makes life worth living. These attitudes and beliefs preceded the person’s depression, and they provided the person with all the building blocks necessary to build the prison of depression. I wrote about this in my first book, which is now called Choosing Not Losing.⁹ I came to realize that the many and various beliefs which depressed people held could be summarised as six attitudes which, if held as absolute, unquestionable truths, would create the prison of depression. These beliefs were:

      1 No matter how good and nice I appear to be, I am really bad, evil, valueless, unacceptable to myself and other people.

      2 Other people are such that I must fear, hate and envy them.

      3 Life is terrible and death is worse.

      4 Only bad things have happened to me in the past and only bad things will happen to me in the future.

      5 It is wrong to get angry.

      6 I must never forgive anyone, least of all myself.¹⁰

      These are not bizarre, idiosyncratic beliefs but are held at least in part by many members of every society, and are often taught by parents to children. They are pessimistic beliefs, but not unreasonable because life is far from easy. However, it seemed to me at first that it could be possible to help a depressed person moderate these beliefs, to be less harsh on themselves and to find it easier to take other people on trust. However, this proved not to be the case. Depressed people, I found, even though they were suffering dreadfully, resisted any suggestion that they might change their beliefs because such a change meant going from certainty to uncertainty. Indeed, they took pride in these beliefs, even though they caused them to suffer. I wrote:

      But you want absolute certainty and you have too much pride to admit that you could be wrong. You take pride in seeing yourself as essentially bad; you take pride in not loving and accepting other people; pride in the starkness and harshness of your philosophy of life; pride in the sorrows of your past and the blackness of your future; pride in recognizing the evil of anger; pride in not forgiving; pride in your humility; pride in your high standards; pride in your sensitivity; pride in your refusal to lose face by being rejected; pride in your pessimism; pride in your martyrdom; pride in your suffering.

      Pride, so Christian theology teaches, is the deadliest of the seven sins since it prevents the person from recognizing his sins and repenting and reforming. Sin or not, it is pride that keeps you locked in the prison of depression. It is pride that prevents you from changing and finding your way out of the prison.¹¹

      It is not just depressed people who possess a pride that prevents them from changing. All of us, to some greater or lesser extent, allow pride to prevent us from changing. To change in some particular way or other would put our sense of being the person that we want to be at risk. We hang on to political or religious beliefs which are clearly not in our interests, or we think of ourselves fondly as being a great singer or a great golfer even though there is much evidence to show that we are not. Moreover, the world is full of people who would rather be right than happy. It is this particular preference which creates most of the suffering in the world, both the suffering we inflict on other people and the suffering we inflict on ourselves.

      This became the subject of my book Wanting Everything,¹² and here I returned to the question of pride. I described the pride that some people take in their high standards. Anything less than perfection is not acceptable to them. Their world has to be perfect and they have to be perfect. When the world fails to be perfect they become angry and try to force people and events to do and be what they want. When they fail themselves to live up to their own impossible standards, they turn against themselves and hate themselves. I pointed out that:

      Pride will allow us to believe all kinds of nonsensical things, and the belief in perfection is one of these. It overlooks the fact that we can perceive anything only when there is some kind of contrast or differential. We know light only because there is dark, heat only because there is cold, life only because there is death, and perfection only because there is imperfection. If we lived in a perfect world we would not know it was perfect.¹³

      Pride can operate in very subtle ways. It can provide an assumption on which we can build beliefs about being humble and unselfish, such as are involved in feeling responsible for everybody and everything. Just what the extent of our responsibility is can often be hard to decide, but in general we can be responsible only for those things over which we have control. When we say we are responsible for something we are implying that we have control over that thing. Claiming to be responsible for everybody and everything is a claim to great power, and such a claim is an act of pride.¹⁴

      When we feel responsible for certain matters but fail to prevent disaster we feel guilty. Guilt is the fear of punishment, and, uncomfortable though it may be, many people prefer to feel guilty than to feel helpless. Guilt implies that you could have kept these matters under control but you failed to act. Helplessness is a recognition of how little in the world we do in fact control and how chance-filled life can be, and this understanding can be very frightening because through it we know that we can be struck by disaster at any time and that our ideas about what is happening can be proved wrong.

      Thus, when disaster strikes and we ask, ‘Why in the whole scheme of things has this happened?’ we seek an answer which will show a clear pattern of cause and effect. Such an answer will remove uncertainty and keep our meaning structure whole. As a result the answer ‘It was my fault’ can be preferable to the answer ‘It happened by chance’.

      Many of us begin our struggle with such questions when we are young. In a television series a mother, Nicky Harris, described the guilt she felt when her second child, a baby boy called Jordan, suddenly died. She discovered that her four-year-old daughter Jessica was also struggling with questions of guilt and responsibility. Nicky said:

      I realized soon after he died that she was feeling the same guilt that I was feeling. We always talked, and about a month after he died she said to me, ‘Mummy, I know why Jordan died,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and she said, ‘I bounced the bouncy chair too hard. Do you remember when you told me not to do that?’ And I felt the guilt flowing out and I was able to deal with it. I just totally knocked that theory on the head. It had nothing to do with it. I thought I’d got that over with, and then a couple of weeks later she came back to me and she said, ‘Mummy, I think I’ve definitely worked it out now.’ This is a four-year-old child talking to me. She said, ‘When Grandma was sitting over there and you were sitting over here, and I was hugging Jordan, and Grandma said, ‘Don’t hug him too tight, you’ll kill him.’ She said, ‘That was it. СКАЧАТЬ