Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ spent a week helping Alice when one of her children was ill. It had been a painful, difficult time for both women. They knew that they should talk, but neither wanted to distress the other. Risking Alice’s pain and anger, Joy told her about the discussions she and Jack had had with me and how she now understood him much better. She said to me, ‘Isn’t it strange, you can live with a man for thirty-five years and not know him.’

      Joy talked to Alice about Alice’s childhood when, as the eldest, Alice had to endure the birth of five siblings. One of these babies had lived only four days, and Jack had ordered Joy, ‘You’re not to cry.’ Forbidden to talk about her grief, for talking brought on tears, Joy withdrew into a depression. She struggled on with performing her duties as wife and mother but, as she told me, ‘I can’t remember Alice then. She was the schoolgirl in the family. It’s no wonder she was argumentative and demanding.’

      Alice, as she told her mother later, did not want her to talk about those times. ‘I thought you were going to criticize me and tell me what a great trouble I was to you.’ Joy was not placing the blame on Alice. She was reviewing what she herself had done and was feeling the pain that loving parents feel when they realize that what they have done to their children, often with the best of intentions, has hurt and harmed them.

      Alice told Joy of her encounters with Jack when she was just blossoming into womanhood. ‘He said that he wanted to undress me. This made me feel that I was supposed to respond, like the ball was in my court. I had to put up a barrier, but at the same time I felt that because I had refused him he rejected me. I still feel he’s rejecting me.’ Joy hastened to reassure her that Jack had not rejected her and that he loved her very much. Alice said, ‘I wish he’d write and tell me that.’

      Jack felt very discomfited at the prospect of writing another letter, but his face lit up with happiness as he told me how, when he had phoned Joy recently, Alice had answered the phone, and instead of immediately calling Joy had asked him how he was. He was delighted too that, as Jenny was leaving after Christmas, she had invited them to visit her.

      His face was again alight with pleasure as Joy told me about her visit to Mark and his family, and about Mark’s little daughter. Jack longed to see his granddaughter, but, as he told me with great sadness, ‘Mark won’t talk to me.’ A few weeks later Jack told me that he had written a second letter, this time to Alice. Mark, too, had phoned and taken the time to talk to him.

      Jack’s story shows how the sexual abuse of children can be handed down from generation to generation, like the family jewels. It seems likely, from Jack’s memory of the trip to the woods and the ice cream, and the fact that he retrieved this memory and wondered about its significance, that he had had some sexual encounter when he was small. However, the events of his early life (he said he remembered almost nothing of his first eight years) and many of the events of his childhood he hid in the deepest recesses of his memory. When he said that he did not expect his children to remember what he had done to them, he was speaking truthfully, for he did not remember what had been done to him.

      This forgetting was not just because he was the kind of person for whom repression is the most favoured form of defence. In those situations where he had been the victim of sexual and physical abuse he was completely helpless. There was no one to whom he could turn for help, and he was a small child in a world of powerful and dangerous adults. He did not want to remember what had been done to him, because with those memories would come that feeling of terrible helplessness and abandonment.

      Jack’s story shows, too, how a child, needing a personal relationship in the way he needs food, will, in the way that a starving man will eat anything, accept affection in whatever form it is offered. Children should never be put in a position where they have to accept love at any price but, alas, many of them are.

Denying Who You Are

      The price that Jack had to pay did not seem to him at the time too high. He was in the business of surviving, so learning to laugh at cruelty instead of being shocked by it did not seem significant; nor did learning to ignore his grief at the loss of the tenderness and love which should have been his by rights. He did not see that learning to laugh at cruelty to yourself means that you are no longer shocked at the cruelty inflicted on others, and that you might now be as cruel to others as others were to you. He could not possibly see, as a child, that in not allowing himself to grieve for himself he would, in later life, not allow his wife to show her grief for the child she had lost, and that this would cause great hurt to the person he loved and needed so much.

      Deciding as a child not to allow yourself to grieve over the cruelty that has been done to you may mean that in adult life you cannot assess or appreciate the sufferings of others. Or you may become the kind of person who sees nothing wrong with persecuting the people whom you dislike. Quentin Crisp, himself no stranger to persecution, was asked on Irish television, ‘Are you accepted more now you are successful?’ He replied:

      I think people misunderstand the principle of persecuting homosexuals, or, indeed, of persecution in general. It is not directed at a person, it is directed at anybody who is not likely to find defenders. During the course of your life you pile up a great deal of bitterness - your wife does not love you, there are your children who do not obey you, there is your boss who does not give you any preferment - and one day you see someone whom no one will blame you for attacking, and then all your bitterness pours out. And it doesn’t matter who it is, as long as you can lash out at somebody without anyone reproaching you later. This is why people attack the weak, homosexuals, but especially effeminate homosexuals.⁴⁶

      Or you may become the kind of person who is plagued by depression. You have no sympathy for the child that you once were. It is very striking in therapy how depressed people will talk with great sympathy about, say, the starving children of Africa, but when they speak of the child they once were there is not a trace of sympathy or concern for that little frightened person. ‘I was a very bad child,’ they will say, ‘and deserved to be punished by my parents.’

      Among those people who devote their lives to helping others are many who show enormous sympathy for other people’s suffering but are remarkably tough and unpitying towards themselves. They can recognize that as a child they had a difficult time, and can acknowledge that they suffered a great deal, but they refuse to give to themselves in adult life what, as a child, they lacked. Instead, they lavish this love and concern on others, and draw satisfaction from that. This is the defence mechanism of projective identification, the means by which we can identify with another person, and then give to that person what we would like to be given to us. Many of the people who are devoted to animals, even to the point of giving up their own lives to save animals from slaughter or of murdering those who appear not to care for animals, are engaged in this kind of identification. This is a kind of second-hand self-love, and it is the equivalent of eating thin gruel rather than a decent meal. However, those people who have never been loved properly as children can find it very difficult to love themselves to the degree which their humanness requires in adulthood.

      Children try to rebel against adults who treat them badly, but the adults can punish them by regarding them as being mad and/or bad. To avoid this fate children learn to conform, and they endure the pains and humiliations of childhood because they know that as well as the threat there is a promise. If you are disobedient as a child bad things will happen to you, but if you are good you will be rewarded, and the reward is that when you grow up you will have the power and privileges that adults have. One of the privileges of adulthood is that you can not only take your bad feelings out on the children in your charge, but you can feel virtuous while doing it. ‘I’m only beating you for your own good, darling.’ Some parents do not indulge in such hypocrisy, but what we all do as we grow up and encounter life’s difficulties is try to feel СКАЧАТЬ