Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ set about working hard at being good. We became very obedient. We tried to do what adults told us to do. Not that we were always successful, because adults often make conflicting demands on children and expect them to do what is beyond their powers to do. Of course we did not want to be totally obedient. Whenever we thought we could get away with it, we pleased ourselves in order to preserve ourselves, but often these self-preserving activities were marred by fear of discovery or by our own sense of guilt.

      Each of us specialized in a particular way of being good. Gregory worked hard at school and became a great scholar. Pat became very competent in organizing and in looking after people. Tom became a good team man, first in athletics and then in accountancy. Dan became a good achiever and a successful businessman. Lisa became very good at being attractive and pleasing people. Rebecca became a most likeable person and a very successful student. Jill became a very sweet, gentle and competent person. Some of us, having been told by our parents and teachers so often that we were bad, obediently fulfilled their expectations and became very good at being bad. One of my clients, Caroline, as a child was told constantly by her parents that she was both mad and bad, so in her teens she proceeded to fulfil their expectations by having affairs with unsuitable men, losing jobs, and becoming so frightened and depressed that her parents put her into a psychiatric hospital. It did not occur to her that in telling a child that she was mad and bad her parents were treating her cruelly. She just blamed herself.

      Whichever form of goodness we chose, we all became very good at being good. This was hard work because we could never stop trying to be good. Occasionally we might take a break, but underneath always was the conviction that ‘Because I am bad, I must work hard to be good’.

      Because everything we did was based on the conviction ‘I am bad’, we were left feeling that no matter how hard we tried, we could never be good enough. No matter what we achieved, we would denigrate our achievement. We felt anxious, guilty and driven.

      For some of us, the sense of being anxious, guilty and driven was only occasionally present, for we had parents and teachers who set us goals which were in our power to achieve, who encouraged us rather than punished us, and who showed us that they cared about us and would not desert us. Even so, our safety was in the hands of adults, and thus the happiest of us would, from time to time, feel anxious and guilty and think, ‘I must do better’.

      Living like this, we could so easily lose heart and fall into despair. (Small children can despair, just as adults can.) We had to find ways of bolstering our self-esteem and giving ourselves hope. We needed to believe, ‘Even though I am bad, I am not that bad, and one day everything will come right’.

      Some of us devised a way of feeling better about ourselves by believing, ‘No matter how bad I am, I am better than other people’. Taking pride in our skills at being good, we criticize, gossip about, and reject other people because they have not achieved the standards of goodness which we have achieved. We look at our precisely mowed lawns and say, ‘Wouldn’t you think the family across the street would get their son to mow their lawn properly? We look at our thin, athletic body and say, ‘Wouldn’t you think my sister would go on a diet and get some exercise?’ We look at our quiet, orderly family and our immaculate house and say, ‘We cannot have blacks/Pakistanis/squatters living in this street. They are noisy, dirty and dishonest.’ (Whenever you find yourself at the receiving end of this kind of criticism, remember that the faults that the people are criticizing are not yours but their own. They are using you to overcome their own sense of inadequacy.)

      Some of us go beyond simply criticizing and rejecting other people in order to make ourselves feel better. Some of us become very strict and controlling of others, very punitive, even cruel.

      Those of us who do this had, as children, prolonged experiences of being helpless and in the power of adults who were inflicting great pain on us.

      In families where the parents are very strict and controlling and demand, using severe punishments and sanctions, complete obedience from their children, the child is put again and again in the situation where the realization, ‘I am being punished by my bad parent’, creates such fear that the redefinition, ‘I am bad and am being punished by my good parent’, is not enough to stem the terror. So the child performs a second redefinition. It is:

       I am bad and am being punished by my good parent, and when I grow up I shall punish bad people in the way that I was punished.

      This is the way that cruelty is handed down from one generation to the next. By inflicting on others a form of the cruelty which was inflicted on us, we deny that the cruelty which was done to us harmed us, and we take pride in our own striving to overcome our sense of badness by punishing those people who could remind us of the circumstances whereby we drew the conclusion that we were bad.

      Those of us who did this would, as adults, say, ‘I was beaten as a child and it never did me any harm’, not realizing that the harm it did us was in thinking that it did not do us harm. Hence, when the opportunity offers, we can punish our children cruelly, while claiming it is for their own good, and we can work as jailers, policemen, soldiers, concentration camp guards, terrorists and torturers, and feel no sympathy for the people in our power.

      Similarly, while some victims of child abuse perform just the first redefinition and believe themselves to be bad, others make the second redefinition, and then, in adult life, claim that, ‘I was sexually assaulted as a child and it never did me any harm’, and go on to do to children what was done to them.

      Most of us would say that we hate cruelty and that we do whatever we can to protect and help anyone who suffers cruelty. We may not realize that while we are very good at recognizing cruelty which is far away from us, we are also very good at ignoring cruelty when it happens right before our eyes.

      I was running a workshop on the theme of psychological therapy for the major psychoses. Half of the people there knew what it was like to be psychotic, either in the schizophrenic way of an introvert or in the mania of an extravert. The other half were professionals, social workers and psychologists who listened, interested, as the others described their experiences.

      At the beginning of the workshop we each described what had brought us to the workshop and what we hoped to get out of it. One young man, Mervin, just said simply, ‘I’ve been allowed out today to come with my friends. I’m psychotic.’

      Mervin listened to the discussion and commented, but he often felt restless and got up to wander around the room. In the afternoon he changed his seat to come and sit beside me.

      There had been much discussion about the insensitive way people are treated in the psychiatric system. Now I wanted to bring this discussion closer to home, to focus on how the cruel treatment of a child has such long-term effects, and how, while we are very adept at recognizing cruelty far afield and being shocked by it, we are equally adept at neither recognizing cruelty close to home nor being shocked by it.

      I began to talk about this and Mervin, as he had done before, interrupted.

      ‘When I was six,’ he said, ‘I got belted for throwing an ice cream on the floor. I’m the youngest of five, and they all had bigger ice creams than mine. I thought it wasn’t fair, so I threw mine down.’

      I put my hand out to pat him. ‘My word, that was a wicked thing for a six-year-old to do, wasn’t it?’

      He recognized my irony and nodded. ‘Yes, and then my father picked up his belt with a great big steel buckle and he whacked me with it.’ He drew back his arm to demonstrate how a man would wield a buckled belt, ‘and he whacked me, right across here,’ and he showed how a small child would crumple under such a blow.

      Now СКАЧАТЬ