Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ give out many messages, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The baby finds these messages to be very powerful because they are first-time events. He has little past experience to provide a contrast, and is as yet unable to translate these messages into words. Instead, the baby creates images of sound, vision, touch, taste, kinaesthesia and smell. These images become part of the baby’s meaning structure and, especially when they are reinforced by later events, can remain with the baby into adulthood, sometimes having powerful consequences.

      In adult life many of us find that we can be troubled by vague anxieties or an apparently inexplicable dampening of our mood when we have no reason to feel unhappy. To work out why this happens it can be useful to bring into clear consciousness the image that accompanies these feelings. If you have kept or managed to regain the confidence you had as an artist when you were small you could paint a picture of the image. Or you could simply ask yourself, ‘If I could paint a picture of what I’m feeling now, what sort of picture would I paint?’, and then carefully inspect the picture in your mind’s eye to find what it means for you. Do not waste your time looking for meaning in terms of Freud’s dream symbols or Jung’s archetypes or tarot cards or the I Ching and the like. What is of supreme importance is what the image means to you.

      As you look for what the image means for you, you are likely to see some connections which go further and further back into your childhood, even to babyhood. It can be helpful to talk to family members about events surrounding your birth and babyhood, though from what my clients have told me, it seems that there are many mothers who do not take kindly to any suggestion that they were anything less than perfect nurturers. It can be difficult to get across that you are not making enquiries in order to blame your mother for not being perfect but simply to establish what happened and, in particular, what your mother was feeling when you were a baby.

      It is important to find out about your mother’s feelings so you can see whether your image arises out of what was going on inside you or out of your response to what was impinging on you from outside. Thus your image might relate to your intense feelings of hunger as your family, caught up in a war, were unable to feed you, or strong feelings of pain from an essential surgical procedure. Or it might relate to your awareness of your mother’s intense feelings, perhaps of anger, hostility, despair, depression, or, most frequently, anxiety. Many women who have since childhood been plagued by vague anxieties and nameless dread find a focus for their fear in their children. Achieving motherhood, they rapidly become experts in every doom or disaster, however remote, which might beset a child. They resist any attempt to apply logic and reason to their endless anxious monologue because, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they are able to take the fear from inside themselves and feel justified in projecting it on to their baby. This can be helpful for the mother but tough for the baby, who cannot distinguish what are his own burdens and what his mother has imposed on him.

      However, babies thus burdened do grow up and become able to reflect upon themselves and their life. Images of hunger and pain allow us to meditate upon the implications of such hunger and pain - namely, the feelings of helplessness, of being abandoned, alone, of having no control, of losing the structure we know to be ourselves. Doing this, we are actually dealing with our present predicament, because these are the issues that often arise in our daily lives, and, in thinking about this, we become more knowledgeable and more courageous. Images of our mother’s feelings allow us to discover that her feelings belong to her, not to us. We can transfer the burden back where it belongs. When, in my forties, I discovered that my image, which I had come to see clearly and named ‘Old Death’s Head’, was of my mother’s state of depression and of her hostility to me, I could then say to myself, ‘That image is not an integral part of me’. With this discovery I not only felt lightened, I saw myself as infinitely more valuable and acceptable than I had thought myself to be.

      Mothers and prospective mothers have often told me how frightened they become when they encounter me talking about how a mother can have such devastating effects on her baby. I respond by assuring them that if, in truth, you love your baby and wish him well and do not seek to hide this from him, then he will recognize the abiding, secure current of your love and will survive the surface ripples that come with your ordinary human fallibility. Just as some babies carry into adulthood images which produce feelings of anxiety and despair, so other babies carry into adulthood images which give self-confidence and security, even when the reality of current events may suggest the opposite. There is nothing to match the self-confidence of an adult who, as a child, never had reason to doubt his parents’ love.

      Bringing up children is not easy. There is no one right way to do it because so much depends on finding a desirable balance between opposites. For instance, you want your child to fit into a group, but not so well that he becomes a doormat for others to walk over, and, as much as you want your child to be an individual, you do not want him to be idiosyncratic to the point of eccentricity. You want your child to understand that to be assertive can be fine in many situations but that a person who is unremittingly selfish is not liked. Moreover, in teaching that some activity is a virtue you cannot help but imply the vice that accompanies it. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then dirtiness is next to evil.

      Bringing up children can never be a simple matter of just feeding and clothing them and keeping a roof over their heads. Our physiology may determine that we each live in our own individual world, but to develop and survive as a person we need other people. Hence children have to learn to fit into society. Some are not actively ‘brought up’ but just left to grow, perhaps because their parents think this method of child-rearing removes the danger of harming the child by imposing rules and demands, or perhaps because they are too distracted or too selfish to do anything but leave the children to bring themselves up. Some children will thrive in a relaxed environment but others will not. Even when the parents impose no rules, the children create their own in order to develop a sort of regularity which gives security. An individual child is likely to develop rules, rituals and fantasies to create an idiosyncratic order, while in a group of children the oldest will take on the parenting role. Moreover, even when the parents think they are making no demands on the child, the latter can be busy interpreting certain of the parents’ words and gestures as implied instructions.

      The child’s interpretations of the parent form the crux of the problem of bringing up children. You can read extensively in developmental psychology, study parenting skills and draw up a plan incorporating every best practice in parenting, or you can ignore the matter of being pregnant until the midwife puts your baby in your arms, but either way the person your baby becomes will be determined not by what you do but by how your child interprets what you do. The best you can hope for is that if you always try to behave towards your children with love, support, kindness and patience, and if you try to understand your child’s point of view and take it into account in making your decisions, there will be a good chance that your children will not lose the love they so readily had for you when they were born. There will even be a chance that your children will, on a few occasions, actually listen to what you have to say.

      I have now seen grow to adulthood a number of babies born to various friends of mine who have always striven to bring their children up with love, support, kindness, patience and an understanding of their children’s point of view. Each of these young adults is now a basically happy individual with genuine self-confidence and not merely that adolescent cockiness which hides deep uncertainty. They get on well with their parents and other people. However, I still see around me parents whose child-rearing practices may be different from those of their grandparents but who suffer the same fraught outcomes. One way or another, many children still find themselves in situations where their sense of being a person is under threat, and so they have to develop many defences in order to keep themselves safe.

      A baby’s sense of being a person - that is, the baby’s meaning structure - develops while he is still in the womb. Different experiences lead to neural connections, the physiological substrate of the meaning structure in the brain, being set up. Once the baby is born, his meaning structure grows and is modified with every experience, and out of the СКАЧАТЬ