Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ and having no difficulty in knitting the external and internal realities together, we can be unaware of the differences in the qualities of the realities we perceive. But once we come under stress the differences in the two realities become more pronounced, and if the stress continues and increases we become less and less effective in knitting our internal and external realities together. Some of us run away from the emptiness we find within and busy ourselves with the outside world, while some of us withdraw into ourselves and shut out the confusion outside.

      A simple way of discovering which reality is more real and how we experience our existence and our annihilation of our sense of being a person is to go through a procedure of questions and answers which is called ‘laddering’. This is a technique which I used in teaching, and only in a limited way in therapy. For a television programme, The Mind Box, I demonstrated this method with Sandy, a psychiatric nurse. While Sandy and I were seen looking at and driving cars in some dashing and bizarre sequences of film made on an empty airstrip, our conversation went as follows:

      DOROTHY: Sandy, we’re going to play a little game. It’s called laddering, and in this we’ll start with something quite trivial, and then go on to something very important, but the first thing I’m going to ask you is, can you give me the names of three kinds of cars?

      [This conversation took place in the days when the UK had a large car industry.]

      SANDY: Yes, Rover, Triumph and Ford.

      DOROTHY: Now can you tell me one way in which two of them are the same and the other one is different?

      SANDY: Yes, Rover and Triumph are all part of British Leyland and Ford is an independent company.

      DOROTHY: And which would you prefer, a car from British Leyland or one from an independent company?

      SANDY: I’d prefer a Ford from an independent company.

      DOROTHY: Why is it important to you to have a car from an independent company?

      SANDY: I think I prefer something that’s somewhat unusual, something different.

      DOROTHY: And why is it important to you to have something that’s different?

      SANDY: In some way, I suppose, I get admiration from other people.

      DOROTHY: Why is it important to you to have the admiration of other people?

      SANDY: The admiration of other people makes me feel good. I suppose it makes me feel… it helps to establish my existence.

      DOROTHY: What would you do if there wasn’t anyone to give you admiration, if you were completely isolated?

      SANDY: Completely isolated? I can’t actually foresee myself in total isolation at all.

      DOROTHY: But suppose you were completely and absolutely isolated for an indefinite period?

      SANDY: In that case I should think I would be withered up, I’d die away. That would be the end of my existence, I think.²¹

      Now Sandy was seen alone in a vast empty space. He looked miserable, but that was because he found making a television programme a nerve-racking experience. In ordinary life he knew he needed people, and he was effective in meeting this need by having a talent for friendship and doing a job which involved people.

      We use the term ‘laddering’ because in this process of question and answer we begin with a trivial decision and value judgement and proceed to more and more general, abstract value judgements until we reach the top of the ladder, the ultimate value judgement, which is how we experience our existence and how we experience our annihilation.

      Being annihilated as a person is our greatest fear. It is worse than bodily death, for after death we can imagine ourselves, or some important aspect of ourselves - our children, our work, the memories our friends have of us - continuing, but after annihilation there is nothing of our person to carry on. We have gone, brushed aside like chalk off a blackboard, engulfed like a raindrop in an ocean, consumed like a dead leaf in a fire, swirled away like a puff of smoke when the wind blows. After annihilation our body may continue to function but that which was our person has gone.

      Sandy was one of those people who experience their existence as being part of a group and their annihilation as isolation. His external reality was more real for him than his internal reality. Had Sandy been one of those people for whom internal reality is more real than external reality, our producer, Angela Tilby, would have had greater difficulty in finding images to accompany our words. Sandy may have made the same choice of cars on the same grounds of wanting something unusual, but he would have gone on from there to talk in terms of personal development and achievement. I would have asked him what would happen to him if he were unable to fulfil his ambitions, and he would have spoken about himself (not his body) being overwhelmed and destroyed by chaos. Not easy images for television to supply, but a fate very real for those of us who experience our existence as the continual development of individual achievement, clarity and authenticity, and our annihilation as chaos.

      All of us fall into one or other of these groups. We are either, as my friend Sue Llewellyn refers to herself, a ‘people junkie’, or we are absorbed in the study and development of our internal experience. The words that are used to distinguish these groups are most unsatisfactory. Those people who experience their existence as the development of individual achievement, clarity and authenticity I called What Have I Achieved Today Persons, or introverts, and those who experience their existence as being part of a group and their annihilation as isolation I called People Persons or extraverts. ‘Introvert’ and ‘extravert’ are words which are used in many different connections, but here it is well to remember that introverts can acquire excellent social skills and can appear to be greatly ‘extraverted’, while there are many lonely and shy extraverts. Thus introverts can behave in ways which would be described as extroverted while extraverts can behave in ways which would be described as introverted. An extravert and an introvert can do exactly the same thing, but they each do it for different reasons. To determine whether you are an introvert or an extravert you need to look not at what you do but why you do it.

      I was certainly not the first psychologist to discover that we divide into two groups, those people who turn outward to the world around them and who have as their first priority their relationships with other people, and those people who turn inward and who have as their first priority a need for organization and a sense of personal development. Freud saw this difference and labelled the two groups ‘hysterics’ and ‘obsessionals’. Jung saw the difference and similarly called the two groups ‘extraverts’ and ‘introverts’. The arch-critic of psychoanalysis Hans Eysenck worked in an entirely different way, using questionnaires with large groups of people, and found what he called the traits of ‘extroversion’ and ‘introversion’. He was interested in the physiology of the brain which underlies these traits. His research team found that the two groups of people could be distinguished by the habitual arousal level of the cortex. Introverts, they found, had higher levels of arousal than extraverts. Thus introverts need an environment which is relatively calm, peaceful and organised while extraverts, in Hans Eysenck’s words, are ‘stimulus seeking’ and enjoy an environment where there is much going on and which contains a great deal of what introverts would call ‘clutter’ and extraverts would describe as comforting and reassuring objects.²²

      While the majority of his fellow psychiatrists in the USA saw depression as a purely physical disease, Aaron Beck became aware in the 1960s that his depressed patients had a particular way of thinking, or what he called ‘a depressive СКАЧАТЬ