Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ were? Some people do have this experience of forgetting all their past life, and when they ask someone for help, they do not say. ‘I’ve forgotten how to read,’ or ‘I’ve forgotten how to get dressed.’ They say. ‘I’ve forgotten who I am.’

      So we need to remember our past. However, what we remember of our past needs to fit in with what we believe is our identity. There has to be a consistency between the story our past tells and who we say we are. If an inconsistency does occur, which do we change, our identity or our history?

      I once had two clients, Annette and Mick. Annette came to see me because she was depressed, and Mick because he was depressed and had had such terrible panic attacks that he hardly dared to leave his house. They had never met, but, as I discovered, they as children had had similar experiences which left them with the dilemma, which shall I change, my identity or my history?

      When they were five years old, had they been asked to give an account of their identity and their history, each would have said, ‘I live with my mummy and daddy and my brother who is ten. Mummy and Daddy love us very much and they are always kind.’

      Then one day Annette and Mick each saw something which destroyed the consistency of their history and their identity. They saw their father, hitherto a kind and gentle man, become enraged with their older brother and punish him.

      Annette described to me how her father had suddenly seized a broom and beaten his son around the head and back, and, when the broom stick broke, he pushed the boy to the ground and kicked him repeatedly. When the mother tried to protect her son, the father pushed her away and she fell against a cupboard and split her face open.

      Mick saw his father strike his brother across the face and then order him to take down his trousers and bend over. Then he heard the whistle of a cane through the air, the crack of it against bare flesh, and the cries of his brother, which, as the whistle and crack went on and on, turned to whimpers.

      How could Annette and Mick reconcile their identity and their history?

      Each scene that they had witnessed was horrible and immensely disturbing. Yet, when I asked, ‘What was it about this scene which made it especially horrible and disturbing?’, each gave a different answer.

      Annette said, ‘It was my father going out of control.’ Annette was an introvert.

      Mick said, ‘It was my brother being shamed and rejected like that.’ Mick was an extravert.

      Annette reconciled her identity and her history by changing her identity. She would no longer respond to events spontaneously. She would get everything about herself, and especially her anger, under control. No matter what happened, she would say to herself, ‘I’m not upset.’ She would keep her father’s anger under control by becoming extremely good and obedient. If he should become angry with her, then it would be her fault.

      Thus, whenever Annette remembered the scene, she did not feel the helpless fear and anger with her father which she had felt then. Instead she felt guilt. ‘If I had been really good that wouldn’t have happened.’ Not allowing herself to feel anger lest her rage go out of control, she never defended herself when people treated her badly. She married a man who did treat her badly, and she blamed herself for all his misdemeanours. She lived a life of misery until she could cease telling herself the lie, ‘I am not angry.’

      Mick reconciled his identity and his history by changing his history. He forgot that he had seen his brother beaten by his father. ‘It didn’t happen,’ he told himself.

      For a lie to be effective it needs to contain a kernel of truth and certainty. I suppose this is why when we lie to ourselves we do so in the reality which is most real to us. Introverts’ lies to themselves are about internal reality – ‘I’m not upset’ – and extraverts’ lies to themselves are about external reality – ‘It didn’t happen.’

      Lying to ourselves about events in external reality may make external reality appear to be nice and wholesome, but we cannot deal with emotions by forgetting them. Mick might have forgotten what he saw, but the emotion the scene aroused in him stayed with him. From then on he was afraid of his father and did not know why. In dreams and in fantasies he found himself in situations where he was naked and ashamed, exposed to humiliation and contempt. When, in his thirties, some business reverses and marriage difficulties made him lose self-confidence, the fear of exposure and shame turned into overwhelming panic.

      For the first few months in. therapy Mick would say, ‘I had a happy childhood. Couldn’t have had better parents. Do people remember much of their childhood? I don’t.’

      Therapists, like generals, have to be lucky, and here I was. Mick was just starting to be interested in his forgotten childhood when his brother, who had left home in his teens and lived abroad, came back for a brief business trip and stayed with Mick. When Mick asked him, ‘Why did you leave home so young?’, his brother told him, and in listening to his brother’s history, the memory of this terrible scene came back to Mick.

      Mick’s process of reconstructing a history and an identity was by no means completed by recovering this memory, but the memory was a key piece in a large jigsaw.

       Splitting ourselves in two, making one part the person who lives an ordinary life and the other part the person who suffers horrible experiences

      Sometimes, the lies we tell ourselves like, ‘I’m not upset,’ That didn’t happen,’ are not enough because the horrible things that happened to us happen not just once or twice but over and over again. Then we might have to resort to a lie which aims to split our self into pieces. This lie is, This is not happening to me. It is happening to someone else.’ Sylvia Fraser found that this was the only way she could deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child.

      ‘When the conflict caused by my sexual relationship with my father became too acute to bear, I created a secret accomplice for my daddy by splitting my personality in two. Thus, somewhere around the age of seven, I acquired another self with memories and experiences separate from mine, whose existence was unknown to me. My loss of memory was retroactive. I did not remember ever seeing my daddy naked. I did not remember my daddy ever seeing me naked. In future, whenever my daddy approached me sexually I turned into my other self, and afterwards I did not remember anything that had happened.

      ‘Even now, I don’t know the full truth of that other little girl I created to do the things I was too frightened, too ashamed, too repelled to do, the things my father made me do, the things I did to please him, but which paid off with a precocious and dangerous power. She loved my father, freeing me to hate him. She became his guilty sexual partner and my mother’s jealous rival, allowing me to lead a more normal life. She knew everything about me. I knew nothing about her, yet some connection always remained. Like estranged but fatal lovers, we were psychically attuned. She telegraphed messages to me through the dreams we shared. She leaked emotions to me through the body we shared. Because of her, I was always drawn to other children whom I sensed knew more than they should about adult ways. Hers was the guilty face I sometimes glimpsed in my mirror, mocking my daytime accomplishments, forcing me to reach for a counter illusion: I was special in a good way. I was a fairytale princess.

      ‘Who was my other self?

      ‘Though we split one personality between us, I was the major shareholder. I went to school, made friends, gained experience, developing my part of the personality, while she remained morally and emotionally a child, functioning on instinct rather than on intelligence. She began as my creature, forced to do what I refused to do, yet because I blotted out her existence, she passed out of my control completely as a figure in a dream.’СКАЧАТЬ