Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ well of ourselves so as to find the courage to face life. If we suspect that we may have been damaged during our upbringing we shall think less well of ourselves, and our courage may fail.

      In order not to feel sad and uncertain some adults say, ‘I had a good childhood and my parents were wonderful,’ and maintain this view by remembering very little of their childhood. Other people, less successful in forgetting the painful events of their childhood, insist that what happens to us in childhood has little effect in adult life. Despite the intense interest in recent years in therapy and counselling, there are still many people who maintain this view. Yet such people will work hard as parents, worrying about their children’s education, teaching them good manners and healthy eating habits, all the things which they believe will help the child in adult life. If I comment, as I often do, that if what parents do has no effect on their children then a lot of parents have wasted an awful lot of time, they look pained and confused. They had been demonstrating the wonderful ability we all have of holding two opposing beliefs at one and the same time.

      By denying that bad things happened to us in childhood, or by denying that what happens to us in childhood has any significance in our later life, we create disjunctions, gaps in what should be the coherent story of our life. This has many serious consequences; one is that because we cannot see the connections between the events of our childhood and our adult life we continue to do to our children what was done to us. Thus do the sins of the fathers continue to be visited upon the children. To recognize that what was done to us in childhood has damaged us and prevented us from fulfilling our potential requires great bravery and an endurance of pain.

      To recognize that what was done to you in childhood has profoundly affected you means that you have not only suffered in childhood but that you cannot enjoy the power and privileges of being an adult in charge of children. The privileges of parenthood are considerable. I remember how my mother and my sister, six years older than me, used to urge me to obedience as a child by telling me not to be selfish. They would, for instance, tell me to carry out some task and save them the trouble of doing it themselves. I would observe that by my acting unselfishly they were enabled to do what they wanted to do - that is, to be selfish. If I pointed this out they would say that I was a difficult, ungrateful child. I found this very unpleasant, but fortunately I did not decide to tell myself that these things did not happen.

      If we learn to deny our experiences we fail to become the person we know we could have been. Some of us understand this very clearly, but most of us do not. We are all haunted by a sense of loss because all of us have denied something of ourselves, but only some of us can name this sense of loss. Sarah Kane in her last play before she killed herself, named her sense of loss. The play is a monologue in which she often speaks of searching for someone she has never met. The penultimate line of the play is ‘It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind.’⁴⁷

      For most of us, all that we know of the myself we have never met is an ache and a longing. Because we cannot name it we find it frightening. We try to ignore this pain, or obliterate it with indulgences of food or drugs or alcohol, or gifts to ourselves, or by prodigious feats of self-denial, or we try to run away from it by immersing ourselves in continuous hard work, or frantic, competitive play, or we try to expel it in our works of art, or bury it in depression, or belittle it in contempt for another’s weakness, or destroy it in violent, murderous rage. However, it remains a painful vacancy, there to trouble and frighten us just when we thought we were safe.

      To be safe in any situation we need to know just what the dangers are. To keep ourselves safe from disease we need to assess the factors in each disease which could harm us and how able we are to ward off each threat. In so doing we have to take into account how physically strong we are and what practical measures we can take to avoid infection.

      Just as we are surrounded by threats to our physical safety, so we are surrounded by threats to our sense of being a person. We need to assess the dangers realistically, and not run away from them or tell ourselves that they do not exist. We need, too, to assess how able we are to counter the dangers and to deal with the effects. The more we value and accept ourselves the better able we are to deal with threats to our meaning structure. However, every act of lying to ourselves - for that is what denial is - undermines our sense of being valuable and acceptable, and having the right to exist as the person we are. The less we value and accept ourselves the greater every threat to our meaning structure becomes, and the more and more desperate the defences we devise to hold ourselves together as a person.

      That multitude of behaviours which gets labelled as neurotic or psychotic, or as mental illness or mental disorder, or as simply mad, has one common cause. It is the loss of confidence in ourselves. We see ourselves as valueless, unacceptable, even wicked, and, in the face of a threat to our meaning structure, we feel ourselves falling apart, shattering, crumbling, even disappearing. We seek to defend ourselves, and the less we value ourselves the more desperate the defence we need to construct.

      Whatever defence we construct is a means of interacting with or fending off the people around us. They, and society generally, evaluate and respond to the defence we choose to use. If we use the defence of working hard and achieving to avoid having to deal with the pain of denial, society is likely to reward us because we live in a society which regards hard work and achievement as virtues. But what happens when our defence conflicts with society’s norms and values? How does society respond to our need to defend ourselves with a desperate defence?

       Chapter Five How Society Responds to Mental Distress

      Plus ça change, plus c’ est la même chose. The more things change, the more they remain the same. Survivors of the psychiatric system, both the patients who suffered at the hands of the system and those members of staff who were appalled by the cruelty of the system and struggled against it, can only agree that the more things change the more they remain the same. Some aspects of the psychiatric system are much better than they were twelve years ago, but much of the system, and the ideas on which it was based, remain. Administrators of a health service became managers of a health business, and psychiatry, which had rejected Freud and Jung and all that followed them, discovered psychotherapy. Such changes brought a vast increase in the psychiatric and managerial jargon that may try to sound thoughtful and efficient but of which Craig Newnes, one of the founders of the critical psychology movement, said, ‘The new National Health Service has embraced a culture of militarism, business jargon, and meaningless soundbites. The militarism is typified by a new language of targets or objectives and sometimes more pointedly; in a recent NHS marketing seminar group leaders discussed “Principles of Marketing Warfare”, “Attack Strategies (including guerrilla attacks)” and “Principles of Guerrilla Marketing Warfare”. And all of this presented to nurses and other staff quite explicitly pacifist in their politics or nature. The business agenda is reflected in a preoccupation with business plans and similar documents concerned with tendering, purchaser risk and efficiency improvements.’¹ Miller Mair, a psychologist who has seen the changes in the psychiatric system over the last thirty years at close quarters, commented, ‘The language of marketed care degrades people and contributes to a cruder understanding of ourselves.’²

      Many psychiatrists use the jargon of therapy, but this jargon, as well as military and marketing jargon, is naught but a smokescreen to hide the fact that the system remains the same, and for the same reasons that the system in France remained the same - namely that the people who hold the wealth, prestige and power in the system do not want to relinquish what they hold, and are prepared to sacrifice those who have no power, prestige or money in order to keep what they hold.

      ’Twas ever thus. Throughout СКАЧАТЬ