Breaking the Bonds. Dorothy Rowe

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      ‘I love my father,’ he said.

      ‘How do you feel about this now?’ I asked, thinking it to be a fatuous question, as just the way he crouched there showed the pain.

      ‘Terrible,’ he said.

      Through all this I had been looking at Mervin. Now I turned to the group, thinking that they would want to offer some comfort and support to Mervin.

      There was a silence. Then David, one of the social workers, spoke. He was addressing Ingrid who had earlier been describing the inadequacies of the care she was being given. He said, ‘I think it’s very important that the gaps in the service be recognized and that the co-ordination of the delivery of the different services be improved.’ He continued in this vein for some minutes, never looking in the direction of Mervin and me.

      Should I, I thought, point out that we were witnessing what earlier I had declared to be so common, our inability to recognize cruelty when it is close to us. Yes, I thought, and did.

      The discussion between David and Ingrid went on for some time, but finally there was a pause, and I pointed out what had happened. I said that not only had Mervin shown us his pain, but he had also shown us how children sacrifice themselves in order to preserve their parent as a good parent. All the people in the workshop who experienced themselves as intrinsically bad had, in one way or another, gone through this experience.

      There were a father and son in the group, John and Peter, who had each been given the diagnosis of manic-depressive. John told me very firmly that what I had said did not apply to him. ‘I had a happy childhood. It was during the war years, but it was happy even so. And I can say the same for my son. He had a happy childhood. He can say the same for himself, can’t you, son?’

      ‘Yes, Dad.’ Peter was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. His father could not see his face. As he said, ‘Yes, Dad,’ he grinned and winked at me.

      His father went on, ‘Of course I had to chastise him. Parents have to hit their children in order to rectify them. My father hit me, and I had to hit Peter. He needed to be rectified.’

      The smile had vanished from Peter’s face. He looked very sad.

      Brian, who had organized the workshop, said, ‘Parents can be cruel to children in more ways than by hitting them. My parents used to talk about me as if I wasn’t there. We’d be sitting at the table and they’d be saying, “He did this”, and “He did that”, as if I wasn’t even in the room. Also, they expected me to achieve for them, all that academic success, just for them and not for me in any way at all.’

      After the workshop, over a cup of coffee, Ingrid and I talked about her discussion with David. She said, ‘I knew that we shouldn’t have been talking like that, that we should have been paying attention to Mervin. But I wanted to go on talking because I couldn’t bear the pain.’

      Whether we remain forever fearful that we are not good enough and painfully vulnerable to hurt and to hurts done to other people, or whether we try to hide our sense of badness by taking pride in our efforts to be good, and criticizing, even punishing cruelly, those who do not reach the standards we have set ourselves, we have, if we are to survive, to give ourselves hope.

       We hope that our efforts to be good will be rewarded.

      When we were small children we discovered that there was a law of the universe, ‘If you are bad you get punished’. True, there were times when we were bad and didn’t get punished, and sometimes we got punished when we had done nothing wrong, but once we had concluded that we were intrinsically and always bad, we knew that whatever punishment we got, we deserved it. Even if we had not done something wrong, we knew that we could have done something wrong.

      Even as small children we were logical, and so we could work out that if, ‘If you are bad you get punished’, is a law of the universe, then its opposite must also be a law of the universe. So we concluded that, ‘If I am good I shall be rewarded’.

      Some of us simply worked this out for ourselves, but others of us were taught this explicitly by adults at home, at school and at church. If we had parents who believed in using behaviourist psychological principles in raising us, we got gold stars for cleaning our teeth and lost our pocket money when we answered back. At school we won prizes for achieving and were punished and humiliated for failing. At church and Sunday School we were told that God knew and kept an account of everything we did and thought. Some of us were warned of the tortures of hell fire, and some of us were promised that if we were good Jesus would save us from all harm, but, whatever, the message was clear. If you are bad you will be punished and if you are good you will be rewarded.

      The threat of punishment made us frightened, but the promise of reward gave us hope. It was on that hope that we built our life story.

      When we were small children learning about badness and goodness, punishment and reward, we were also busy constructing the story of what our life would be.

      Our story begins with who we are and where we live, and goes on to tell how we intend to fulfil our ambitions and to be loved by all, or at least by one significant other. It might be, ‘When I grow up Prince Charming will come along and fall in love with me. We’ll get married and live happily ever after.’ Or it might be, ‘When I grow up I’m going to be rich and famous and greatly loved.’

      Our story contains, too, scenes where we have our revenge on those who have injured us, and scenes where our true worth shall be revealed and all those who have criticized and humiliated us will be ashamed, astounded and lost in admiration for us. Best of all, there are scenes where we receive an abundance of rewards for all our strivings to be good and for all our sacrifices. Indeed, our whole story is a recompense for what we have suffered in childhood.

      In that time when we are creating our story we are also making the greatest sacrifice, short of death, that we can make. We are giving up being ourselves.

      In learning to be clean, we had to learn, not just the rules about bowels and bladders, but about washing hands, changing underwear, polishing shoes and so on and on. Left to ourselves we would not have bothered about such things, but to be good we had to give up pleasing ourselves, just as we had to give up pleasing ourselves in order to become unselfish and considerate.

      In learning to be responsible and hard-working we had to give up a great deal of our desire to play. It is only in the last fifty years or so that adults have recognized how important play is in a child’s development, but this has led many parents and teachers to become involved in organizing and directing children’s play instead of simply letting children play. The children are directed into learning all sorts of arts and skills, into joining children’s organizations like the Scouts and church groups, and into a highly organized social life. They have no time to themselves, either in blissful solitude or just hanging out with their friends. So while poor children are deprived of the freedom to be themselves in play by the necessity of working, children from affluent backgrounds are deprived of the freedom to be themselves in play by interfering adults who believe that children should always be achieving and improving, that is, being a credit to their parents.

      As babies, we laughed when we were happy, cried when we were sad, and yelled when we were angry. As children, we had to give up being ourselves as we learned to hide our emotions. We had to learn not to laugh in the wrong places, to look cheerful no matter how sad we were, and to be calm and quiet no matter how frustrated and angry we were. Since our emotions are spontaneous, learning to inhibit them is tremendously difficult, and so we often failed. The phrase ‘being СКАЧАТЬ