Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ since we live so far apart. It worries me that my only real friend here is my mother. She’s now seventy-eight and one of these days she’s going to die and that scares hell out of me. When she does that I’m sure I’ll be back with my therapist for a while.

      ‘I want to meet people, but I don’t want to make the effort involved. I want people to come to me rather than me going to them. Someday I’ll get over it and I’ll be ready to do something to jar me out of my lethargy. It’s been two or three years since the last attempt and I just float along. I’m totally involved in my job. People think I’m crazy the hours I work. The depression has left me not really a hermit, but something approaching that. I would like to get involved with something, but I can’t find anything. I’d like to work with Aids victims, but watching people die would probably bring me down. But that’s the kind of thing that appeals to me.’

      ‘What is it that appeals to you in that?’

      ‘Helping people. I find myself talking to people – I’m the mother figure at work, I’m by far the oldest person there, and so sometimes they come to me with their problems and I find myself thinking, yeah, I’ve been down that road, I know what they’re talking about.’

      ‘You see helping people as important?’

      ‘Oh yes, I enjoy that. I like to do that.’

      ‘Why is it important to help people?’

      ‘Gee, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that. It feels good. I suppose It’s an ego builder that I can help solve someone else’s problems. It just feels good. It’s a warm feeling. Feels useful. I like to feel useful. ‘That’s why I like my job. I feel useful. It’s not just a rote thing.’

      ‘Why is it important to feel useful?’

      ‘You’re after something and all I can come up with is that it feels good. I suppose that the books would say that ifs a question of having a poor ego and therefore one must feel useful in order to make the ego feel good. I don’t know that I agree. At this point the ego needs some help. But I’ve always been that way. I’ve always enjoyed helping, long before I was depressed, so I don’t buy into that. It may be part of the American work ethic. Possibly because I come from parents who were into helping people. That’s what you do.’

      ‘If we looked at the other end of it, what would happen to you if you were not able to help people and you became completely useless?’

      ‘Then I’d be dead. If there’s no “problem to solve”, then there’s nothing, mainly because – the word challenge comes in, but It’s not quite the right word, but if there’s no challenge to life, then what’s it all about? Why bother?’

      ‘Are you describing the challenge in terms of your relationship to other people? You’re able to relate to them through helping them, that there’s that connection, and It’s a challenge to be able to do that sort of thing?’

      ‘Yes, it’s a raison d’être. Even when I wasn’t in a helping mode, when I was married with children, I was always involved in a drama group, in church. We had a group of friends who did crazy things to each other, and we used to write operas, and that was a kind of a challenge. It wasn’t helping anybody, but it was having a hell of a good time.’

      ‘You were part of a team.’

      ‘Oh yes. It was creativity. And there’s a creativity to helping people. That’s a big part of it, to exercise the creativity, being able to come up with the right questions and the right solutions and possibilities. Yes, there’s a creativity to it, and though I don’t draw or do artistic things, it’s essentially artistic.’

      ‘So your reason for living is to be with other people in a creative way, whatever form that creativity might take? The greatest threat is finding yourself in a situation where there are no other people?’ [I meant that if there were no other people, then there would be no one to help.]

      ‘No, in a great many ways I’m a loner and I enjoy my privacy. In fits and starts I enjoy having company, having friends, but I’m not willing to go out of my way to get them. If someone throws me into a situation where there is a problem, I enjoy it, but I don’t need to have other people constantly.’

      ‘Having them around means that you’re in danger of being hurt again?’

      ‘I was an only child, so I’ve been in a lot of ways a loner. I’ve never liked crowds. At work we have a great many social activities and I generally don’t go. I don’t like big groups. I like to be with small groups. I don’t feel I need a lot of people. I need two or three friends, I like to share good times. They feel better when they’re shared. That’s why I don’t like to go to the theatre alone.’

      We went on talking and I said, ‘I expect you and your therapist have talked about how angry you were with those who didn’t protect you from your father.’

      ‘I don’t think we ever talked about that. My mother left when I was ten. The abuse had been going on for a couple of years. Maybe I am angry with the old girl. But I like her enormously. We’re great friends.’

      ‘That’s the great problem. It’s much easier to be angry with someone you don’t like. When we’re angry with someone we love it’s a terrible conflict, and when it’s somebody we care about and feel sorry for – as we get older, we see our mothers as frail little old ladies – we wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt them. But there’s still that anger.’

      ‘You may have found something. Maybe I am angry with her. It doesn’t ring any bells, but maybe it’s part of it.’

      ‘When we’re little, what we expect from our mother is that she’s going to be there all the time and that she’s going to solve all the problems and she’ll look after us properly. We come into the world with the belief that that’s what mothers do. I suppose we get it initially when we’re in the womb because then our mother is actually doing that. She is being the perfect protector and is always there. So when we emerge we think she’s still going to do that. But, of course, she fails to do that and then we get angry with her. Just in the ordinary run of things we all as children get very angry with our mothers because they fail us. They’ve got to fail us, otherwise we would never separate from them, but that doesn’t prevent us from being angry. We want to be independent while being secure, and so we get angry when she prevents us from being independent and we get angry when she fails to provide us with total security. But if there’s something more that happens, then we can’t but help ask the question why didn’t she protect me? It’s this problem that It’s not possible to have one good parent and one bad parent. Because if you’ve got a parent who is bad to you and the good parent does not protect you, then in fact you have two bad parents.’

      ‘Yes, It’s making sense. She left and I wasn’t even aware of being angry with her for leaving. At the time she left I didn’t throw temper tantrums.’

      ‘You were left with your father?’

      ‘Yes. I didn’t express anger, hurt, yes, but not anger. Later on I went to boarding school for a year and she would come every single Sunday to see me. I think that’s the main reason I never got angry with her.’

      ‘There’s another reason for not getting angry. When you’re a People Person, as I sometimes call them, anger is a dangerous emotion because that’s the emotion which will drive people away from you. So with People Persons not experiencing anger, or labelling anger as something СКАЧАТЬ