Kitabı oku: «Breaking the Bonds», sayfa 4

Finding the Source of Our Greatest Fear

Whenever someone consults me I try to establish in our first conversation how that person experiences his or her sense of existence and perceives the threat of the annihilation of their self. When somebody tells me something that sounds important I ask,

‘Why is that important?’

When I was in California I met two people, George and Ruth, each of whom had encountered many difficulties in their lives.

George was sixty-two and recently retired. He was very courteous, ready to tell me his story, but his eyes looked tired. He had been diagnosed as having ‘dysthymic disorder’, but an inability to have a good night’s sleep and to concentrate were, he said, his main problems.

George told me how his first wife had left him. That, he said, ‘was not the kind of thing I could take easily. I don’t think I ever got over it. With my present wife things have worked out quite well, except that there’s a total lack of affection. Life is difficult for me. The reason I can handle all these things, and the reason I haven’t said forget it, is because of my religious belief. That allows me to cope with all these things.’

‘Can you tell me what your religious belief is?’

‘We’re Christadelphians. I believe that God is who He says He is, that there is a God. I can’t, try as I might, see any sense in Darwinism. I feel that there’s a power behind all of us. The Bible is His instruction to us and therefore we must find what He wants of us and what He’s promised to us without preconceived ideas or having someone tell us what to believe. The promises were given early on to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. Those same promises were repeated to King David. Those promises include anyone who encompasses those beliefs. We all have basic sinful ways inherited from Adam. Christ’s purpose was to give us a way out. He was the Son of God and he therefore, being perfect, was able through his sacrifice to save all those who would come to him. Those promises will come to pass when he returns to earth and then there’ll be a thousand-year period of shaping up the earth, bringing people into alignment, and we’re told nothing beyond that, God being the be-all and the end-all. Christ will turn everything over to Him. Along with that, we believe that marriage is something which you should respect and hold to. My present wife has taken up my beliefs strongly. For many years she didn’t give religion the time of day. She started to like what she saw and the people we associate with. Finally she went to a class and she liked that.’

‘Did that draw the two of you closer together?’

‘In a sense, but not in so far as affection is concerned. I’ve just decided that this is not in my life. In my own family we were never affectionate. I don’t recall my mother and father, or my brothers and sisters having a hug between any of us, ever. With this group now, that’s something I’ve had to get used to, always that’s the greeting, a big hug, and, my goodness, with that something passes between you. It’s like something bad goes out of you. It doesn’t go into them, but you share something. I had never had that during my life. That’s something I appreciate about this group. But as far as depression is concerned, the way it shows up now, I feel that life is no big deal. I don’t think it’s all that worthwhile, short of what I believe in. I’m trying to improve myself as best I can for as long as I can – that precludes any notion of doing away with yourself. I don’t think I’d ever consider that. I simply don’t think that life’s all that great.’

‘Would I be right in thinking that when you think about your life you feel disappointed?’

‘In some ways yes. I’ve never had any great aspirations. I’ve never wanted great wealth. I’m possibly disappointed in what I’ve accomplished. It’s possible to do a lot better than I did with the job. But I wasn’t able to do that. Concentration was always a problem, and another thing was my personality. Even though I wasn’t a boss, when people were doing things wrong I’d get after them. I was really add about it quite a few times.’

‘So you wanted the jobs done properly?’

‘I felt it was all I could handle to do my own job.’

‘My grandmother always said, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well”. Does that apply to you?’

‘Well, my friends tell me that it does. I don’t like to be tagged with being a perfectionist. But yes, generally speaking, if I want to do a job, I want to do it well.’

‘Why is it important to you to do it well?’

‘Because of my pride in what I’ve accomplished. I’m not interested in doing it any other way.’

‘Why is it important to accomplish?’

‘Maybe I can give you a for instance. The shower in our house, I considered was a poor design. I decided I wanted a nice tiled shower. I bothered everyone in town until I had quite a good knowledge about how to build a tile shower. The result is very nice. I enjoy it. I wouldn’t enjoy it if it was a mess.’

‘You don’t enjoy mess at all?’

‘I have mess around me, but I don’t enjoy it. It bothers me.’

‘What would happen to you if you couldn’t accomplish anything, if everything around you was a mess?’

‘Oh my God! I’d never considered that. A lot of it has to do with what other people think. I take other people in and show them the shower.’

‘It’s important that other people approve of it?’

‘Approval, now there’s a thought. That’s something I seem to seek all the time. I wish I didn’t. I have a cousin I really look up to. He couldn’t care less about what anybody thinks he’s done. If they pick on him about it it just rolls off his back. He never makes any effort to organize anything.’

‘You’re a good organizer?’

‘Yes, if I’m motivated.’

‘There are a lot of people who want to get things organized and under control. I call them What Have I Achieved Today Persons.’

‘I’m sure I’m that way. Every night I’m frustrated if I haven’t done something during the day. Other people just seem to do nothing all day long. They’re happier than I am. My memory is such that if I have half a dozen things which need to be accomplished in a day, I write them down and I cross them off, and if I cross them all off I feel pretty good.’

We talked about his problems in not sleeping, and then George said, ‘I wonder what I should be doing that I’m not doing. I think I should be quite excited about the prospects of my religious beliefs. There really are an awful lot of proofs. There’s enough there to get a person excited, but there are also the things that prevent me from doing what I want. There are the physical problems like sleeping and aches and pains, and you wonder who you could talk to who could guide you so you correct some of these things, and that bothers me a lot. I just don’t know who to talk to. Things like this medication. I don’t know whether I trust my doctor. A lot of medical changes have come to pass because of things that I’ve suggested to him. I guess they don’t know everything about what they’re dispensing.’

George talked about some of the difficulties his children were experiencing, then said, These kind of things don’t inspire confidence. I feel partly responsible because I didn’t keep the family together and give them a better basis. Anyway, my biggest problem is the lack of sleep and the lack of concentration and ability to recall. Our belief requires, or I feel it requires, I study a lot. But if you can’t keep your mind on what you’re studying, what good is it? So that was probably my biggest problem, because it relates to my spiritual belief. The sleep just adds to that problem.’

‘Why is it important to you to do this kind of study?’

‘One reason is that all the people around me have been doing it all their life. But they can say verses all day long. I’d like to have some ability, just a little bit, enough where I can function in my own group. I won’t even stand up and offer a prayer, let alone give a talk, because I can’t seem to remember. Part of it is I’m afraid and part is that I haven’t applied myself well enough. That bothers me too.’

‘Whenever we’re frightened, it’s hard to remember something we’ve learned.’

‘That’s happened to me for many years now, and it’s really common. When I’m forced to think of something, there’s a blank. If I’m off by myself my own prayers are satisfactory. I know if I stood up in front of the group a wall would just cover me, and I don’t want that to happen.’

‘You won’t risk it happening, and so you won’t let yourself discover that you could get up and it will be all right.’

‘I can’t believe that.’

‘The problem with us being wonderful organizers, we like to get everything organized beforehand. People like us always have problems in being spontaneous. We don’t have enough trust in ourselves, in life, to act spontaneously. That’s when we become our own worst enemy. We stop ourselves from being spontaneous.’

‘How do you start?’

‘I think one part is not to worry about making a fool of ourselves.’

‘That’s easier said than done.’

‘It’s important to come to realize that it’s not the end of us if we do make a fool of ourselves. When we were children, that did feel like being wiped out; as adults we can realize It’s not the end of everything, and that people like us to make mistakes, not in a nasty way but –’

‘So we seem human.’

‘Yes. You must have a tremendous knowledge of this material because you’ve studied it for so long and because It’s so important to you.’

‘I want to know it even better, so it will become even more important, that’s what I’m striving for. I feel that I’m only just beginning, that I’m really not at the point where I feel that I could be acceptable.’

‘Acceptable to whom?’

‘To God.’

‘So you still doubt that God accepts you?’

‘Well acceptance, according to the Bible, takes place at the Judgement Seat. That’s the final acceptance. Whereas, I don’t begin to say who He will or will not accept. I wouldn’t dream of it. He’s put down certain guide-lines. They’re only guide-lines. I don’t say that you can ever be Christ-like, you can’t, but you should strive for that intended goal, realizing that you’ll never make it, but forgiveness is there. But I still think this Judgement has a purpose, It’s there to judge. So there has to be a line, a certain demarcation, and it will be different for each individual, according to their abilities and circumstance. But It’s possible not to be on the right side of that line. It’s got to be, otherwise why the Judgement? I’m concerned that I haven’t progressed far enough. And this is good to a degree, for it keeps you striving, but I’m quite concerned about myself at this point, that I need to progress further. Now the people around me don’t tell me that. They say of course you’ll make it. You’re hanging in there until the end and that’s what counts and perhaps they’re right. But I don’t want to play the odds in the wrong direction. You want to stack your deck the best you can.’

‘If you were God would you forgive you?’

‘No.’

‘So, if you can’t forgive yourself, you can’t expect God to forgive you?’

‘No, there are things that I wouldn’t even begin to tell you about me that have me convinced that I’m a pretty poor character. They’re in the past, but they show what I’ve been. These thing bother me a lot. I have worked on myself as a result, and It’s my great hope that that will count for something.’

‘That is what counts, what our intentions are and that we recognize our mistakes. In the past we acted in ignorance. We can’t change the past but we can come to understand why we did what we did and try not to make similar mistakes, but if we go on punishing ourselves we actually prevent ourselves from becoming wiser.’

‘I just wonder if there are things that I should be reading. I’ve started going to classes that are free, some things that will occupy my mind, a couple of financial classes, one a self-esteem class, a very popular class. I’m hoping that attending that class will help too.’

‘Feeling yourself to be bad and inadequate and then have your conscience come after you, that’s what you need to work on, and coming to feel better about yourself and turning your conscience into a good friend.’

‘I need to learn how to avoid my inadequacies.’

‘Until we accept our inadequacies, we can’t change them. If we can accept our own inadequacies we can accept other people’s inadequacies and then we can love them.’

‘That’s a big problem too, being critical.’

‘What you turn on yourself you turn on other people.’

‘I expect them to be much better than me. I think that they should be. I don’t know why I lay that on them. It’s something I’m trying to come to terms with.’

Thus George in this conversation showed that he experienced his sense of existence in the development of individual achievement and organization, not just in getting things done, but in gaining greater clarity of understanding. All the things that had gone wrong in his life he experienced as being mess and chaos, the circumstances which threatened to overwhelm and annihilate him.

When we experience our sense of existence in terms of individual achievement we need some standard to measure our achievement against. We look at what other people have achieved, and, if we approve of their achievements, we then seek their approval of our achievements. George set himself very high standards, and when other people failed to live up to his standards he was most critical of them. The one person whose standards he approved of was God, and so he sought God’s approval.

This would have been a satisfactory way of living, except for one thing. George did not value, accept and forgive himself, and so he did not believe that God would value, accept and forgive him. He was drawn to his fellow believers because they gave him the warmth and acceptance his family had never given him, but to belong meant to believe in God’s Judgement, and until he could see himself as worthy of God’s forgiveness his nights of restless torment would continue.

Not all of us are like George, experiencing our sense of existence in individual achievement, and the threat of annihilation as the loss of control and chaos. Many of us are like Ruth.

When I went into the waiting room to meet Ruth she smiled at me and we began talking like we had known one another for years. She had that immediate, wonderful talent for easy conversation, laughter, and making people feel that she is interested in them.

Ruth was fifty-two and had had a very sad life. She had been diagnosed as having ‘recurrent major depressive disorder’ and had made two serious suicide attempts. Once we were settled in the consulting room Ruth began to tell me about her desire to die.

She said, ‘I came out here and fell in love with the wrong man and decided to go to Washington and that’s really where the trouble began. The boyfriend from here, who had never been able to say the words “I love you”, suddenly sent me a tape which ended with “I love you”. That didn’t help. He finally came to see me and never uttered the words, and when he left it was with the announcement that it was all over and he did not expect to see me again. I went straight downhill.

‘A few weeks after that, I made my first suicide attempt. Very spur of the moment. One grand and glorious evening I decided I’d had it and, talk about the foolishness of American doctors, I called a doctor I had seen only once and right over the phone he gave me a prescription for a hundred phenobarb, quarter grains, and I took that whole bottle that night. I very carefully disposed of all the things I didn’t want anyone to find. Unfortunately, I woke up and found myself in hospital. Then I had to see a psychiatrist. My mother came to visit me and so he decided to discharge me. I discovered that I was terribly angry. I never knew I was angry. Somehow through that experience I discovered enormous anger and I still don’t know what with. I’m not as mad now as I was then, but there’s an awful lot of anger still in me. I don’t know why.

‘I got better. Did a lot of crying and a lot of talking. I found I could say almost anything to my mother. Only one subject I do not discuss with her, and that’s that my father sexually abused me. I don’t say that to her because she thinks he was God on earth. So we talked a lot and I cried a lot. We came back out here and I called the man in question and told him what I had done and said I’m planning to come back and I don’t want to run into you in the neighbourhood and feel this horrible constraint. I want to feel we can just say hello to each other. I realize that’s not really what I was doing but I thought that’s what I was doing, and he of course got an enormous case of the guilts and said I should come and live with him.

‘I had some questions about that, but I wanted it so badly that I decided to do that and got back out here and moved in with him and for about a year it went quite well, and then it began to go wrong and I began to get depressed again. I went to talk to a therapist who was a great help to me, but it was not enough. It didn’t solve the problem and so one afternoon I decided, okay, that’s enough. I’m going to check into a hotel and take every pill I can find and that’s that. It’s not fair to my therapist, but I’m a fairly good actress. She knew that something was wrong, but she didn’t know how badly wrong. So I checked into my hotel and I had three litres of wine. I drank almost all of that and took all the pills and went to bed.

‘The hotel maid found me the next morning. So I ended up in a psychiatric hospital. I was quite annoyed. Stayed there a few days, saw my therapist some more and started to function a bit better. I don’t think it’s really gone. I don’t feel suicidal any more, but I’ve never got over the feeling of, “Gee, I wish it had worked”. I don’t function as well as I should. But it doesn’t particularly bother me.’

‘Are you working?’

‘Oh yes. I spend my life working. I work a great many weekends and late nights. I know I should get out more. I’m a theatre person and I should go to the theatre. I’m a musk person and I should go to concerts. But I’m not interested in them. I don’t care about anything, except my job. It consumes all my energy. I couldn’t get the motivation to do anything else. Basically I work and come home and turn on the television and go to bed. That doesn’t really bother me. It seems to me that if that’s the state I’m in that’s okay.’

‘Do you have friends outside of the people at work?’

‘No, I don’t. I’d like to, but I don’t do anything that allows me to meet people outside of work. I haven’t made friends and that I’m sorry about. I do like being with people. My best friend is in Washington, but I feel constrained when I’m with her and her husband. I spent a few days with them and we had a good time, but there’s some constraint 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 else, labelling it as fear, is common.’

I said to Ruth, ‘If you could paint a picture of what you feel when you’re depressed, what sort of picture would you paint?’

‘Because I don’t visualize well at all that’s a very difficult one for me. Can I paint you a word picture? It’s an emptiness in the pit of the stomach, and an inability to concentrate on anything, and a jumble of thoughts, a great deal of lethargy. I’m now beginning to get a picture of a bloated child with a hole down the middle of her stomach, sort of one of those starvation pictures with a big bloated belly, but there’s a hole. That’s the best I can do visually. It’s an emptiness. It’s a feeling of lack of control about my own life. I can’t make it better. I can’t make it work. I can’t solve the problem.’

‘I get a picture of a child, when you said emptiness, there’s emptiness around the child. There’s also that lack of control in that when you were a little girl having these things done to you, you weren’t in control of that. That’s complete helplessness.’

‘I like to believe that, but I think I could have controlled it if I’d tried.’

‘How old were you?’

‘I think eight. I certainly could have controlled it later on and I certainly could have controlled it then simply by saying go away. Maybe I didn’t know that then, but I know that now.’

‘That’s the difference. When we’re children and in the power of adults we experience a terrible helplessness.’

Now I asked Ruth how she imagined death would be.

‘Peace. It’s just peace. I have no fear of it at all. If we decide to have an atomic war I want to be right under it when it falls. Death is peace, an end to all the hassle.’

Ruth clearly understood that she experienced her sense of existence as a relationship to other people, and hence other people were essential to her. But other people had hurt her badly, so to protect herself she had withdrawn from people, and maintained only those relationships, like those at work, where she was in control. Her feeling of being used, rejected and abandoned, and her suspicion that this was what she deserved created in her a sense of emptiness, mirrored in her image of herself as a starving, empty, lonely child.

As a small child Ruth knew that she needed other people to give her her sense of existence. So when her father used her as an object to relieve his own sexual needs, she dared not refuse, even though she hated him for what he did. Such an experience has been described by Sylvia Fraser in her autobiography My Father’s House:

My arms stick to my sides, my legs dangle like worms as my daddy forces me back against his bed. I love my daddy. I hate my daddy. Love hate love hate. Daddy won’t love me love me hate hate hate. I’m afraid to strike him with my fists. I’m afraid to tell my mommy. I know she loves Helen because she is good, but she doesn’t like me because I am dirty dirty. Guilt fear guilt fear fear dirty dirty fear fear fear fear fear.¹⁵

Like Sylvia, Ruth dealt with her rage against her father and her disappointment and anger with her mother by blaming herself and by trying to deny her anger. Again, like Sylvia, to recover her sense of being a whole, valuable and acceptable person she would need to let herself feel her anger at being so badly used, and through that find forgiveness for herself and those who took advantage of her innocence.