Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on my strength. I can achieve this easily because one of the ideas I have discarded is that I must work hard to be good, because no matter how good I am it is never enough. Now, if occasionally I am good, it is solely because it pleases me to be so.

Fear of Not Being Good Enough

      When we came into the world as babies we were quite pleased with ourselves and did whatever we wanted to do. We slept when we were sleepy, cried when we were hungry or uncomfortable, and, when offered a nipple, sucked only if we wanted to suck. We had no notion of good or bad. We just were. Then society stepped in and said, ‘This won’t do. You are not satisfactory as you are. You have to be different.’

      This all came as a terrible shock to us. We discovered that we were not masters of our own universe. There were greater powers out there and they were insisting that we had to be what they wanted us to be. We had to eat when they wanted and not just when we were hungry. We had to empty our bowels and bladder at the time and place they wanted and not just when we felt the need. We resented this interference, but we knew that the powers that demanded this from us were also the people on whom we depended for survival, and so we acquiesced. We became obedient, and, even more than that, we accepted our family’s definition of us as not being good enough and needing to improve.

      Having accepted this as a child, we moved into adult life fearing that we were still not good enough and ready to react with shame and guilt whenever some parental figure chided us for not doing well enough. The editor of Good Housekeeping saw nothing wrong with writing, ‘The other visual treat is the second in our series of Norman Parkinson spectaculars photographed in Tobago. This time it’s summer evening clothes - silky, slinky, sexy numbers. The models look wonderful, very Fifties, very Parkinson and should inspire many of us to take stock and try a little harder.’⁶ This was written in 1985, but women’s magazines have not changed, except to increase the range of matters in which women must try harder. It is not enough for a woman to look beautiful and wear beautiful clothes. She must also have a successful career, have a great social life, and be the perfect mother, cook and lover. Women readers react by making an even greater effort to lose weight or else sink deeper into a feeling of inadequacy and despair.

      Men do not escape this sorry state of forever trying to do better to justify one’s existence. They have, in some way, to ‘make it’, and when they do not, or when what they have ‘made’ is taken away from them, they become very frightened. Some young men set themselves the goal of having ‘made it’ by the time they are thirty, and so, if they fail, enter their thirty-first year in a state of rage and despair. Others set the vital age at forty, and when the failure to be rich and famous combines with a lessening of sexual performance, they sink into depression, or seek denial in alcohol or in the arms of a much younger woman. Forty is indeed a dangerous age.⁷

      When we were small babies we had no concept of ourselves as separate entities. We were contiguous with the rest of our world, which presented itself to us as a continuously changing phantasmagoria. Then, by about eight months, most of us made that curious transition to the belief that what we saw was not a display of an infinite range of spectacles, coming fresh to our eyes every moment, but a limited range of spectacles which came and went and then returned. We acquired the understanding that we did not have an infinite number of mothers but just one who came and went and then returned and who was somewhere else when we could not see her. When a favourite toy disappeared, we had some idea of where to look to see it reappear. Making things disappear and reappear became a great delight as we rejoiced in our power to control our universe. We were not always successful at this. Sometimes Mother disappeared and did not reappear, no matter how hard we tried to get her back.

      With the belief that objects go on existing even if they are out of sight came the understanding that if objects do this, then it is worth the bother of having some sign that stands for them when they are out of sight. There is no point in having a system of signs if there is an infinite number of things in our universe and their appearance is never repeated, but if events are repeatable then we may as well have some sort of language which we can use in reference to them. So babies who acquire ‘object permanence’, as Piaget called it, go on to acquire language.

      As we went through this extraordinary process, something which seems to be to a large extent peculiar to the human species, we were learning that our world consisted not just of ourselves but of ourselves and other objects. Some of these objects were very important to us, especially our mother, in whose warm and loving gaze we bathed in ease and delight. Then one day, when we were absorbed in some activity, we discovered this loving gaze had vanished and had been replaced by something cold and rejecting. Suddenly we were wrested out of the state of being ourselves and we became an object in another person’s eyes, an object of disgust and contempt. We were exposed, vulnerable and frightened. We had discovered shame.

      Few of us can remember our first experience of shame, but we know when a small child has discovered it. The child ceases to be frank and open in all situations and to all people. He squirms and hides his face. If he does not look, then perhaps no one will look at him.

      Experiences of shame which end with affirmations of love and reconciliation - a good cuddle - can be extremely helpful to the small child who is in the process of creating his sense of being a person, but when there are too many such experiences, or when such experiences never end with affirmations of love and reconciliation, the child can be left with the belief that he is, in his very essence, bad and unacceptable. Shame is about our identity, what kind of person we are, and when we are small and having the world defined for us by our parents, then if we are shown over and over again that we are unacceptable, that we should be ashamed of ourselves, we come to believe that this is one of the facts of the universe, as immutable and unchangeable as the pattern of night and day. As we get older such a belief about ourselves can be confirmed again and again by other events.

      Margaret could not bear to be touched. She could not bear to be alone, but when she was with people she could not bear them to come too close. When she first came to see me she told me that she knew she was a bad person. She had known this ever since she was a small child. She knew that she was bad through and through. She spoke of herself as a child without any sympathy or concern, because, as she told me when I asked, she did not deserve any. She said that as a child she had done something terrible but she would not tell me what it was. It was so bad that the children in her street had been forbidden to play with her. If she told me what it was I would see how bad she was and then I would not want to have anything to do with her.

      This was the theme of our meetings, every fortnight for more than two years. She would sit, head down, saying nothing, or speaking so softly that I could not hear what she was saying. She wore glasses which darkened in the light, but when I eventually challenged her on this she changed them to lighter ones so I could at least see where she was looking.

      Again and again she would say, ‘If you knew what I was like you wouldn’t want to know me.’ Sometimes I would mock her gently, saying, ‘That’s right, I’d throw you out - tell you never to darken my door again.’ But most times I would say, ‘That’s just how you feel about yourself.’

      For the first year she resisted fiercely my idea that no one is intrinsically bad but that we can learn through what happens to us to experience ourselves as bad. Then she started to experiment with this idea. She would say to me, ‘I say to myself, “Margaret, you’re all right,” but it doesn’t work.’

      She found our sessions together very painful. Silences forced her to writhe in embarrassment and say, ‘I don’t know what to say.’ If I had to travel it caused her tremendous anxiety. When I discovered that she was one of those worriers who believe that worrying about something СКАЧАТЬ