Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ we are totally in the power of other people we face the greatest threat we can ever know. It is the threat to annihilate us as a person. Even if the people in whose power we are are kind to us, we are still in danger, for if they insist that we feel, think and act solely in the ways that they wish then we will cease to be ourselves. We will become an automaton, a puppet, not just a thing, but a no-thing.

      To preserve our self we will make all kinds of adjustments and rearrangements. We try to be as disobedient as we dare. No law-abiding citizen is a hundred per cent law-abiding. No one wants to be taken over completely by the government. Some of us in the situation of being completely in other people’s power will decide that if we cannot live as ourselves we will die as ourselves, either in heroic defiance or in suicide.

      When there is little we can achieve by action in preserving ourselves, we make alterations to the way we operate as a person. These may not be healthy alterations, but they enable us to survive. In the same way, when our body is starving, we will eat anything which will enable us to survive, no matter how noxious or unpalatable such food may be.

      There are many things we can do to ourselves to preserve our self. Frequently we choose one of the following:

      We can shut off our feelings and operate calmly, not letting our feelings come through to disturb us, perhaps even denying that we have feelings.

      Or we can insist that everything is perfectly fine, and resolutely forget every bad experience inflicted on us.

      Or we can split ourselves in two, making one part the person who lives an ordinary life and the other part the person who suffers horrible experiences.

      Or we can define ourselves as bad and deserving the terrible things that are done to us.

       Shutting off our feelings and operating calmly, not letting our feelings come through to disturb us, perhaps even denying that we have feelings

      What gets us into most trouble when we are children are our emotions. If we get angry, we are punished. If we are frightened we are told not to be silly, not to be a coward. If we are envious or jealous, we are told we are wicked. Even when we show our love we can be told that we are soft, or silly, or too clingy and dependent. The only emotion adults encourage us to feel is guilt.

      So we have to find ways of keeping our emotions under control. For introvert children, irrespective of what the adults around them might say, emotions pose a particular threat. They are disorganized and disorganizing, and so threaten a complete loss of control. So introvert children need to develop ways of organizing emotions and keeping them under control.

      What better way than denying that you feel any emotion?

      If you are an introvert you know how readily you can make yourself feel utterly, utterly calm while the crisis rages around you. You may have realized, too, how essential it is, once the crisis is under control or you have a chance to be alone, that you let the emotions out, cry your tears of rage or sorrow, or shake with fear, or curse the instigator of your anger.

      However, such calmness can get you into trouble. Extraverts can scorn you for, apparently, having no feelings. Worse, if you never allow yourself to feel and express your feelings you cease to be able to make proper sense of what is happening to you.

      By ‘proper sense’ I mean striving to get as close to the truth as it is possible to be. Discovering what the truth of any situation is is always difficult, but we, both introverts and extraverts, make it impossible to get anywhere near the truth if we lie to ourselves.

      There are times when for our own safety or for the welfare of others it is beneficial to lie to other people. But,

       Never, never, never is it beneficial to lie to yourself.

      Unfortunately for us, this is the kind of lie all of us use most frequently.

      In times of crisis, there is a world of difference between saying to yourself:

      ‘I’m going to keep calm. I’ll get upset about this later,’

      and

      ‘I’m not upset.’

      The first statement is a recognition of what is happening and a plan for dealing with it effectively. The second statement is a lie, and if we do not let ourselves know what the truth of the situation is we can never deal effectively with the situation.

      Neither in our external reality nor our internal reality do things disappear simply because we say they do not exist. When you are about to be run over by a bus, you cannot save yourself by saying, ‘I’m not about to be run over by a bus.’ When you are consumed by emotion, you cannot save yourself by saying, ‘I’m not upset.’

      Emotions, like buses, will not disappear when we deny their existence. They go on doing what they are doing whether or not we acknowledge their existence, and, if we do not acknowledge their existence, we cannot deal with them appropriately. Instead, the emotions deal with us in ways which are not appropriate.

      Denied anger can burst forth in uncontrolled rage, often against inappropriate objects, like our children.

      Denied fear and anger can interfere with the effective functioning of the auto-immune system, and thus make us prey to all kinds of diseases.

      Denied fear, anger and murderous hate can reappear in compulsively repeated fantasies which threaten to be acted upon and so have to be guarded against with repeated obsessions. Thus a woman, haunted by the fantasy that she might injure her family, will go on and on obsessively cleaning her house. A man, haunted by the fantasy that he will kill someone, will return, again and again, to a place where he thinks that, while driving home, he has knocked down a pedestrian, and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he will not be able to convince himself he has not injured anyone.

      In our society, many men, both introverts and extraverts have been taught to lie to themselves in order to become ‘a real man’. The lie which such men tell themselves is that they do not have tender, or artistic, or nurturing feelings, and that they never feel afraid. Thus they feel sex without love, anger without compassion, and, since they cannot feel part of the world and other people through their creative and nurturing feelings, they treat the world and other people as objects to be used and abused. Such men can become politicians, government officials, businessmen, criminals, soldiers, terrorists, torturers, and the kind of scientist who believes that all human experience can be understood solely in terms of chemical change.

       Insisting that everything is perfectly fine, and resolutely forgetting every bad experience inflicted on us

      If ever you have been in a situation where you have had nothing to do for a long time, like being in bed ill or on a boring journey, you will have discovered how all sorts of memories come back to you concerning events which you may not have thought about for many years, if ever. You can see how, if you gave yourself the time and were not always attending to things in the present and planning, or worrying, about the future, you could recall most of your past life. You might not remember names (psychologists say that the name remembering bit of our brain has a capacity for only about forty names, which was all that we needed when, in our tribes or villages, we met not more than forty people in our lifetime) but the events and people are recalled, and those from childhood come back with exquisite clarity. You can be amazed at just how much you can remember.

      It is tremendously important that we remember our past life, because it is our past which gives us СКАЧАТЬ