Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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       4 Believing That We Are Not Good Enough

      We all, as babies, entered the world knowing that we had the right to exist. We were there, so we had the right. We were there, and we accepted ourselves. We valued ourselves, so when we felt discomfort we did what we could to look after ourselves. Crying, yelling and thrashing about were usually effective in getting the relief we needed. We did not waste time asking ourselves, ‘Do I have the right to exist?’, and, ‘Dare I ask for anything for myself?’, questions which bedevil and sometimes ruin the lives of a great many adults.

      As babies we could not have wasted time on such nonsensical questions because we were too busy doing something else – making sense of what was happening around us and to us.

      Making sense of what happens around us and to us is like breathing – something we do every moment we are alive and something we cannot not do. Even when we have dulled our senses with alcohol or drugs, or when our brain has suffered injury, we still go on making sense of everything, even though the sense we make in dreams, or stupor, or confusion is not very sensible.

      We start making sense of everything when, in the womb, our little, developing cortex begins functioning as a cortex. In the womb we make some kind of sense of the warmth and darkness, being held and having our needs met, but when we make our journey into light we have a great deal more to make sense of.

      When we are born we have to learn quite complex things, like what is close to us and what is far away. However, while we cannot tell whether a round object is a ball close enough to touch or the moon shining through the window, there is something we know straight away. We know what a face is. Indeed, if some psychologist shows us cartoon drawings of faces and other things when we are only five days old, we can tell which are the faces, and we go on looking at them because we find faces the most interesting things in our world.

      Faces are the most interesting to us as babies because they respond to us. We engage them in conversation, and we are very good at this when we are babies because we know that we need continuing conversations in the way that we need air, food and water. Conversations are fascinating, exciting, and, in making sense of everything, the most challenging. A rattle is a rattle, but what does Mummy mean?

      The process of making sense of everything happening around us and to us can be called the making of meaning. We each create our own world of meaning, and there is no way while we are alive that we can step out of this world of meaning. Even when we say that something is meaningless we give it a meaning, that is, The meaning of this thing is that it cannot be fitted easily into my world of meaning’. We live in meaning like a fish lives in water.

      The way we make meaning is that we divide the seamless, moving, changing limitless everything that is into sections. We label these sections, and then evaluate them.

      For instance, at present I am looking at the scene outside my window. According to the way I have divided this scene, it comprises trees, and, beyond that, cars and students going by. My division of the scene into trees, cars and students obscures the fact that the trees, cars, students and me are all linked together by a substance I cannot see but can sometimes feel, the air which we each take in, use and let out. The ways in which cars, people and trees take in, use and release air are intimately related in chemical reactions sometimes to their mutual benefit and sometimes not. Moreover, this scene has much more meaning for me than just being made up of objects and people. Everything I look upon has some special value for me. The leaves are turning yellow, and so the scene appears to me to be both sad and beautiful. I am pleased that the old almond tree in my garden has survived an unpleasant disease, and each car and each student suggests a multitude of associations with experiences I have had at other times and in other places.

      The meanings we create are not just descriptive and evaluative. They are predictions about what we expect our future will be.

       Every time something happens to us, or we do something, we draw a conclusion. Then we use that conclusion to guide us in the future.

      For instance, this morning I needed to do some shopping in a particular part of town. I decided to park my car in a garage that I had never used before. Since it was early morning I predicted from the conclusions I had drawn from my past experience of garages that I would be able to park on one of the lower floors. However, when I drove in, I found that most of the floors were reserved for the government offices next door and that I had to park my car on the roof. I drew the conclusion that this was too inconvenient a garage to use when shopping and resolved never to use it again.

      Like everyone else, I have been creating meaning and thus predictions ever since my brain started working. Our first conclusion, formed when we were a foetus, must have been, ‘I’m alive!’, though, of course, we drew this conclusion in feelings and images and not in words. The prediction we formed from this conclusion was, ‘I intend to stay alive’, little knowing what dangers would assail us and what stratagems we would have to devise to stay alive. Staying alive was not just a matter of keeping our body alive. Our ‘I’ had to stay alive, for to be a body, however lively, without being an ‘I’ is not to be alive.

      We draw conclusions from our first sight of the world that we are born into. My friends, Deborah and Scott, decided that their baby should be born into, not the clinical coldness of a hospital, but the warmth and friendliness of the Birth Center in Philadelphia. As they described it to me, Scott was there, ready to receive the baby when the top of her head appeared. Another push, and Scott found himself being appraised by two steady blue eyes. He was quite sure that he was being assessed, and it was not until the baby decided in a look which clearly said, ‘That’s all right’, that she became free of her mother and was lifted to meet her mother’s astonished gaze and smile. Even when little Hannah was busy nuzzling her mother’s breast, she continued to gaze at her adoring, enchanted parents.

      If we are lucky, like Hannah, in our choice of parents and the time and place of our birth, the first conclusion we draw about the world we have entered is that it is warm, loving and ready to meet our needs. We carry this conclusion with us for the rest of our lives, although as we get older we need to modify this conclusion so that it is now. ‘The world is only sometimes warm, loving and ready to meet my needs’.

      If we are unlucky, like babies born in times of war and famine or to mothers who are too distracted by their own problems to envelop the baby in love, our first conclusion about the world is that it is cold, hostile and unable or unready to meet our needs. It is hard to maintain our sense of self-worth in such a world, and so a baby drawing such) a conclusion soon loses the self-confidence with which he entered the world. He becomes frightened and, if he continues to feel that he is punished and defeated by a hostile world, he finds that the only way he can protect his sense of ‘I’ is to isolate himself in the prison of depression. Thus many children, born in unhappy circumstances, live their lives in a state of depression.

      The cure for such children, as it is for adults, is to help them discover, through experiences of joy, kindness and love, that their conclusion that. The world is always cold, hostile and unable or unwilling to meet my needs’ is just as wrong as the conclusion, The world is always warm, loving and ready to meet my needs’. The first conclusion leads to fear and the second to disappointment.

      The conclusion that СКАЧАТЬ