Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ being an introvert, was always concerned with achieving, and this she managed to do, even though from her earliest childhood she was always afraid.

      She told me, ‘I think I could be scared pretty easily as kid. If someone strange came to the door, I would hide under the bed.’

      ‘What did your parents think about this?’

      ‘They weren’t picking it up. School was just hair-raising. I’d vomit every morning before I went to school. I was frightened about my ability to achieve.’

      Jill did achieve. She took two degrees, became a university administrator, and married. But she was always anxious, always somewhat defensive with other people. She said, ‘I was going all right until I was thirty-seven and then the bottom just dropped out. I remember being awakened at night. I knew something horrible was going to happen. I made the mistake of going to work that day and things got all out of proportion. People were looking at me, and I don’t think I was acting too well. That night I came home and I couldn’t sleep. There were cars coming round and I could see their lights and I thought they were checking on me. After that I went into hospital, altogether five times, and each time I was just given drugs. I’d get into these panic states and I’d go back in. I’d be running up and down the hall. I couldn’t sleep. I’d get more and more frightened. I’d be thinking a lot of different things very fast, interactions I’ve had with my brothers and with my dad, a lot of different things, all frightening things. Then I’d get even more frightened. In hospital they’d have four, five, six people dragging me down in order to shoot me with something. And they put me in isolation. That was the worst experience. Suddenly people were following me and I was put into a locked ward. I don’t know how long I was in there. I haven’t been in hospital now for eight years or so. But it’s terrible, I just stay in bed. I’m immobilized. I don’t know what the drugs are doing for me. I guess I’m suicidal because not a day goes past but I think of ending it. The psychiatrist sees me about once every three months for a change of the pills. He just asks me how I am. It’s terrible being at home day in and day out, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s terrible enough for me to try to get out of it.’

      When terrible things happen to us we can find ways of coping with them and coming to terms with the results of them if the people around us acknowledge what is happening to us, allow us to talk about what is happening and how we feel about it, and confirm our value by giving us love and support. When bad things happen to introverts they need the people around them to help them sort out the confusion and to maintain the sense that external reality is real. Once external reality seems unreal, it becomes more and more difficult for introverts to distinguish between the thoughts in their internal reality and the events in their external reality.

      All of us can have difficulty in distinguishing the enemies we actually have from our feelings of being persecuted. Introverts, when they find themselves in danger, can feel themselves persecuted by strangers or people with whom they have little connection. After all, it is better to see a stranger as an enemy that to see yourself as betrayed by those who should have cared for you.

      Jill’s experience was of parents who did not see what was happening to her, of a grandfather who exploited and despoiled her, of a grandmother who rejected her, of a mother who, though loving, says. That was long ago. You should be over it by now,’ and a psychiatrist who has never listened to her story but who says, ‘Keep taking your tablets. Psychotherapy is not appropriate for you.’

      Although Jill and I had been friends for nearly ten years and had had some good times together, it was only on my last visit when her inactivity was impossible to hide that she told me about her childhood and her time in hospital. I had met a psychotherapist in Jill’s home town who I knew would understand very readily what Jill had gone through, and I urged Jill to talk to her. But Jill refused. She expected, as she had always done, that once someone knew about her past that person would reject her. She risked telling me because I lived far away, but she would not reveal what she saw as her intrinsic badness to someone in her home town.

      To talk about how Jill and Lisa felt about themselves and, similarly, how all of us, to some greater or lesser degree, feel about ourselves, I have to use words like ‘bad’, ‘evil’, ‘worthless’, ‘unacceptable’, but these do not convey what the experience of badness actually entails.

      These words are simply outward signs of a very powerful internal experience. We each give this experience a structure by turning it into an image which we locate somewhere inside ourselves. There are, I guess, as many images for badness and unacceptability as there are people to hold them. The kinds of images I have come across are of:

      a pit or swamp of utter foulness and blackness;

      a translucent centre of purity, besmirched and befouled with black filth;

      a small child, naked and alone, consumed by shame, encircled by contemptuous eyes;

      a raging torrent of crimson and black fire which will devour all it touches, or a wild, primitive, raging beast which, when loosed, will hack, slice, smash, lay waste, and devour.

      I have found that people who have no memory of ever being accepted and valued and whose depression is profound and long lasting have an image of their badness and unacceptability like the first kind, a foul pit or swamp.

      People who have brought from childhood some sense of being valuable and acceptable but to whom hurtful, ugly things have happened have images of badness and unacceptability like the second kind, a besmirched pure centre.

      People who in childhood have suffered intense shame and humiliation have an image of their badness and unacceptability like the third kind, a humiliated child.

      People who in childhood have suffered the kind of experiences which aroused in them murderous hatred but which gave them no opportunity to discharge and resolve this murderous hatred in non-destructive ways (for instance, being punished for shouting, ‘I hate you Mummy!’) have an image of the fourth kind, a raging torrent or a wild beast.

      No doubt there are many other kinds of images, just as there are many different kinds of conclusions we can draw about our childhood experience, and certainly our images can change. The first kind of image, so powerfully present in the immobility of deep depression, could, under provocation, change to the fourth kind, and the second kind, with a further series of crushing events, could change to the first kind.

      Equally, the images change as we discover that what we saw as undiluted badness and unacceptability was nothing more than the conclusions we drew about ourselves in childhood and which no longer apply, and that those forces inside us which we were told were wicked are actually among our most valuable possessions, for they are the source of our strength, courage, creativity and our joy at being alive. The black swamp becomes a cavern filled with riches, the translucent centre is washed clean, the child is comforted and admired, the fire becomes a flame of purity and hope, and the beast a cuddly pet – or perhaps the images change in ways as many and various as the stars in the sky.

       (D 4) To change your image of your badness and unacceptability into an image of your worth and acceptability, it is helpful if you make the badness and unacceptability image clear. You might like to bring it clearly into your mind, or, going beyond that, describe it in words, or in a poem, a picture, a sculpture, or music. Whenever we bring something clearly into consciousness and then put it outside ourselves in words or in something we make, we take control of it and thus reduce its power.

      Now it is much easier to ask, ‘How did I acquire this image?’

      What Pat, Anna, Dan, Lisa and Jill described of their early childhood is something which, to some greater or lesser СКАЧАТЬ