Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ to meet our needs, and sometimes warm, loving and ready to meet our needs, and that we should develop efficient ways of assessing and dealing with the dangers and opportunities that the world presents.

      Our biggest handicap in reaching this conclusion is that we do not always go back and check our conclusions. I am certainly not going to visit that garage every week or so to check whether those government cars still have priority. Even more so, when our conclusions are drawn from especially happy or especially sad or dangerous situations, we do not want to go back and reassess. If you as a child have concluded that your grandfather was a great guy you don’t want to look back and see that he was a miserable old man who gave your grandmother a bad time. Similarly, you don’t want to recall the events which made you so frightened of the world.

      There is another important reason why we do not want to go back and reassess our conclusions. We don’t want to be constantly reminded how chancy and changeable our world is. We like to feel that some things stay the same.

      When we wake up in the morning we don’t want to have to check the conclusion we made years ago that, ‘If it’s snowing outside I’d better put on something warm.’ When we make our morning coffee we don’t want to have to check the conclusion we made as a child, ‘Don’t put your hand in boiling water.’

      There also isn’t time to check our every conclusion to see if it still applies to the new situation. Yet we have to use our conclusions constantly to make sense of every new situation and deal with it. It is strange how many people question whether our childhood has any influence on us in adult life. If they thought about it they would realize that:

       All we can bring to a new situation is our past experience.

      The past experience which we use all the time includes our experience as a child.

      So, while we do abandon some of the conclusions we drew in childhood – like believing in Father Christmas or thinking that our 23-year-old teacher is very, very old – there are many conclusions that we never check and which we go on using to make sense of a new situation and to deal with it.

      So, just as we, when we wake up, don’t see any need to check the conclusions we drew, years ago, about the weather and clothes, or about taking care with boiling water, so we don’t see any need to check the conclusion we drew about ourselves when we were children.

      Now some of us had parents and teachers who were always kind and supportive, and some of us had parents and teachers who were demanding, critical and punitive, some of us had a happy and secure childhood, and some of us had an insecure and unhappy childhood, but, whatever, we each drew the same conclusion about how a child and an adult must try to behave.

      This conclusion which each of us drew as a child and which underlies everything we think, feel and do is:

       Because I am not acceptable as I am, I must work hard to be good so I can live with myself and not have other people criticize and reject me.

      These are my words. Each of us feels, expresses and acts upon it in our own individual way.

      We each differ in what we mean by being good.

      Some of us would not use the words ‘being good’, but instead think in terms of setting goals and achieving them. Nevertheless, failure seems like badness and weakness. Tom blamed himself when his firm let him go. George sets himself goals in studying the scripture so as to be acceptable to God. Ivan Boesky set himself the goal of gaining great wealth and, while being tried and sentenced for illegal stock exchange dealings, explained, ‘I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.’¹⁷

      Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of meeting our responsibilities and doing our duty. Nevertheless, failure to meet our responsibilities we see as wickedness. Pat did not think of herself as being good when she nursed her sick parents, but she did feel she was wicked to be angry with her sisters for not helping her.

      Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of being helpful to other people. Such helpfulness, as Ruth said, ‘feels good’.

      Some of us would not talk of ‘being good’, but of being acceptable to other people. This can mean always striving to be well groomed and properly dressed or, most frequently, always going along with what other people want and never simply pleasing yourself. Lisa, who worried about her appearance constantly, always tried to please other people and considered doing anything to please herself as selfish and therefore wicked. If she did dare to do something to please herself – like eating a cream cake – she felt guilty.

      So here we all are, each in our own way, striving to be good.

      Most of us are extremely good at being good. We work hard, achieving goals and immediately setting new ones, we meet our responsibilities to others, we consider other people’s wishes before our own, we try to make our appearance attractive, we keep our homes clean and tidy, we strive to be unselfish, unaggressive, kind, loving, loyal, modest, generous, friendly, cheerful, understanding, patient, and punctual, and we try to teach these ways of being good to our children.

      Most of us are so good at being good that we generally forget that all this striving to be good is in an effort to overcome our feeling that as ourselves we are not good enough, that we are bad, even evil, and certainly unacceptable to ourselves and to other people.

      Nevertheless, if someone comments on how good we are, we must instantly disclaim it. We feel that we have to say, ‘Oh, not really’, and go on to talk about how incompetent we actually are, or how dependent we are on other people, or how we ought to achieve more, or how it is luck and not virtue or competence which enables us to do what we do. A few of us have learned to respond to a compliment with simply, ‘Thank you’, but even then the Thank you’ must be said modestly, lest we be punished by those people who see it as their duty to humble the proud. Thus, no matter how good we are at being good, we can never be good enough.

      No matter how good we are at being good, whenever we fail to be good – when we do not achieve our goals, when we make a mess of things, or let people down, or fail to please people, or people criticize, reject or abandon us, or when life does not turn out the way we expect it would – even if we do not directly blame ourselves for our failure, we become aware of a sense of badness and unacceptability. Then we feel very frightened, and we have to strive hard to put things right.

      Where does this sense of badness and unacceptability come from? After all, when we were small babies we were pleased with ourselves. We existed, and we did not doubt that we had a right to exist. How was it that later we drew the conclusion that we were bad and unacceptable and that we had to spend our lives working hard to be good?

Drawing the Conclusion ‘I Am Bad’

      Sometimes we draw conclusions slowly, amassing evidence little by little, and gradually becoming certain that something is as it is. Sometimes something sudden and dramatic happens, and we know instantly and clearly what our conclusion is.

      Sometimes someone says something to us and we realize that we are not as good as we thought we were. Anna told me how, when she was a small child, her mother contracted tuberculosis and so was in hospital for much of Anna’s childhood. She said, ‘When I was sent to boarding school I used to go to chapel and pray for my mother. This was during the Second World War and there was this other СКАЧАТЬ