For the sceptics, understanding that we may be repeatedly hoodwinked by our own minds is the start of the only kind of intelligence of which we are ever capable; just as we are never as foolish as when we fail to suspect we might be so.
We take the first steps towards maturity by determining some of the ways in which our emotional minds deny, lie, evade, forget and obsess, steering us towards goals that won’t deliver the satisfaction of which we’re initially convinced. A readiness to mitigate the worst of our everyday foolishness contributes to the highest kind of emotional intelligence of which we may ever be capable.
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT
One of the characteristic possessions of all European nobles for many centuries was an elaborate depiction of their family tree, showing lineage down the generations. The person at the foot of the tree would see themselves as the product of, and heir to, all who had come before them.
Aristocratic genealogy may seem a quaint preoccupation, but the idea behind it rests upon a universally relevant concern: irrespective of the status details of our families, each of us is the recipient of a large and complex emotional inheritance that is decisive in determining who we are and how we will behave. Furthermore, and at huge cost, we mostly lack any real sense of what this powerful inheritance might be doing to our judgement.
The presence of the unknown past colours, and sharply distorts, all our responses to the present. We interpret what is happening in the here and now – what a friend meant by their silence, what we are responsible for, how much permission we need – through expectations fostered in long years whose real nature we have forgotten.
Psychology has built up a humbling array of tests that show up the presence of the unknown past and, with it, a tendency to impose – or, as the technical term puts it, to ‘transfer’ – old assumptions and patterns of thinking on to contemporary reality. The best known of such tests, devised in the 1920s by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, presents us with groups of ambiguous images generated by spilt ink, upon which we’re asked to reflect without inhibition, expressing freely what we feel of their atmosphere and identity.
Naturally, Rorschach’s images have no predetermined meaning; they aren’t about anything in particular, but are suggestive in a vast array of directions, so that the atmospheres we see in them depend upon what our pasts most readily predispose us to feel. To an individual who inherited from their parents a kindly and forgiving conscience, the image shown here might be viewed as a sweet mask, with eyes, floppy ears, a covering for the mouth and wide flaps extending from the cheeks. Another, hounded across childhood by a domineering father, could equally readily view it as a powerful figure seen from below, with splayed feet, thick legs, heavy shoulders and a head bent forward as if poised for attack.
With similar intent, a few years later, the psychologist Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan, a lay psychoanalyst, created a set of drawings that presented people in deliberately indeterminate situations and moods. In one example, two figures are positioned close to each other, their faces open to a host of interpretations. ‘It’s perhaps a mother and daughter, mourning together for a shared loss,’ one respondent who has had a close relationship with a bereaved parent might say. Or another, bearing the burden of a punitive past, might assert, ‘It’s a jealous old crone in the process of undermining a talented young employee who has failed at an important task.’ A third, wrestling with a legacy of censured homosexuality, might venture, ‘I feel something unholy is going on out of the frame: the older woman knows a sexual secret about the younger person, a highly effeminate man, who is embarrassed but perhaps also somehow turned on …’
Scary dad or cute bunny? Hermann Rorschach, inkblot test, 1932.
Catching our own past in our interpretations of ambiguous images: Henry Murray, Thematic Apperception Test, 1943.
Yet one thing is certain: the picture doesn’t show any of these things. The elaboration is coming from the person who looks at it, and the way they elaborate, the kind of story they tell, necessarily reveals far more about their emotional inheritance than it ever does about the image itself.
Further in this vein, from the 1940s, the American psychologist Saul Rosenzweig devised tests that tease out our inherited ways of dealing with humiliation. His ‘Picture-Frustration Study’ (1948 for children, 1978 for adults) shows a range of situations to which our psychological histories will give us very different templates of responses.
One kind of person, the bearer of a solid emotional inheritance, will tend to be resilient when someone hurts or behaves badly towards them. It won’t be a catastrophe, just a few unpleasant moments. But such a verdict would feel entirely alien to someone who has been bequeathed a backdrop of shame and self-contempt, always looking to reconfirm itself in contemporary incidents.
Maturity involves accepting with good grace that we are all – like marionettes – manipulated by the past. And, when we can manage it, it may also require that we develop our capacity to judge and act in the ambiguous here and now with somewhat greater fairness and neutrality.
Saul Rosenzweig, Picture-Frustration Study, 1978.
2 Knowing the Past
PRIMAL WOUNDS
Almost universally, without anyone intending this to happen, somewhere in our childhood our trajectory towards emotional maturity can be counted upon to have been impeded. Even if we were sensitively cared for and lovingly handled, even if parental figures approached their tasks with the highest care and commitment, we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury – what we can term a set of ‘primal wounds’.
Childhood opens us up to emotional damage in part because, unlike all other living things, Homo sapiens is fated to endure an inordinately long and structurally claustrophobic pupillage. A foal is standing up thirty minutes after it is born. A human will, by the age of eighteen, have spent around 25,000 hours in the company of its parents. A female grouper will unsentimentally dump up to 100 million eggs a year in the sandy banks off the north Atlantic seaboard, then swim away without bothering to see a single one of her offspring again. Even the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet, is sexually mature and independent by the age of five.
But, for our part, we dither and linger. It can be a year till we take our first steps and two before we can speak in a whole sentence. It is close to two decades before we are categorized as adults. And in the meantime, we are at the mercy of that highly peculiar and distorting institution we call home and its even more distinctive overseers, our parents.
Across the long summers and winters of childhood, we are intimately shaped by the ways of the big people around us. We come to know their favourite expressions, their habits, how they respond to a delay, the way they address us when they’re cross. We know the atmosphere of home on a bright July morning and in the afternoon downpours of mid-April. We memorize the textures of the carpets and the smells of the clothes cupboards. As adults, we can still recall the taste of a particular biscuit we liked after school and know intimately the tiny distinctive sounds a mother or father will make as they concentrate on something in the newspaper. We can return to our original home for a holiday when we are parents ourselves and find, despite our car, our responsibilities and our lined faces, that we are eight once more.
During our elongated gestation, we are at first, in a physical sense, completely at the mercy of our caregivers. We are so frail, we could be tripped up by a twig; the family cat is a tiger. We need help crossing the road, putting on our coat, writing our name.
But our vulnerability is as much emotional. We can’t begin to understand our strange circumstances: who we are, where our feelings come from, why we’re sad or furious, how our parents fit into the wider scheme and behave as they do. We necessarily take what the big people around us say as an inviolable truth; we can’t help but exaggerate our parents’ role on the planet. We are condemned to be enmeshed in their attitudes, ambitions, fears a
nd inclinations. Our upbringing is fundamentally always particular and peculiar.
We can brush so little of it off. We are without a skin. If a parent shouts at us, the foundations of the earth tremble. We can’t tell that some of the harsh words weren’t perhaps entirely meant, or had their origins in a tricky day at work, or were the reverberations of the adult’s own childhood. It simply feels as if an all-powerful, all-knowing giant has decided, for certain good (if as yet unknown) reasons that we are to be annihilated.
Nor can we understand, when a parent goes away for the weekend, or relocates to another country, that they haven’t left us because we did something wrong or because we are unworthy of their love but because even adults aren’t always in control of their destinies.
If parents are in the kitchen raising their voices, it can seem as though these two people must hate one another inordinately. To children, an overheard altercation (there was a slammed door and several swear words) may feel catastrophic, as though everything safe is about to disintegrate imminently. There is no evidence anywhere in the child’s grasp that arguments are a normal part of relationships; and that a couple may be entirely committed to a lifelong union and at the same time forcefully express a wish that the other might go to hell.
Children are equally helpless before the distinctive theories of the parents. They can’t understand that an insistence that they do not mix with another family from school, or that they follow particular dress codes or hate a given political party or worry about dirt or arrive no less than four hours early for a flight, represents a very partial perspective on human priorities and reality.
Children can’t go elsewhere. They have no extended social network. Even when things are going right, childhood is a gentle open prison.
As a result of the peculiarities of our early years, we lose balance. Things within us start to develop in wayward directions. We may find that we can’t trust easily, or need to keep any sign of dirt at bay, or get unusually scared around people who raise their voices. No one needs to do anything particularly shocking, illegal, sinister or wicked to us for serious distortions to unfold. The causes of our primal wounds are rarely outwardly dramatic but their effects are rarely insignificant. Such is the fragile base of childhood that nothing outwardly appalling needs to have happened to us for us to wind up inwardly profoundly scrambled.
We know the point well enough from tragedy. In the tragic tales of the ancient Greeks, it is not enormous errors and slips that unleash drama but the tiniest, most innocent of mistakes. From seemingly minor starting points, terrible consequences unfurl. Our emotional lives are similarly tragic in structure. Everyone around us may have been trying to do their best and yet we end up now, as adults, nursing certain major hurts which ensure that we are so much less than we might be.
IMBALANCES
The imbalances go in endless directions. We are too timid or too assertive; too rigid or too accommodating; too focused on material success or excessively lackadaisical. We are obsessively eager around sex or painfully wary and nervous in the face of our own erotic impulses. We are dreamily naive or sourly down to earth. We recoil from risk or embrace it recklessly. We emerge into adult life determined never to rely on anyone or are desperate for another to complete us. We are overly intellectual or unduly resistant to ideas. The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume without end.
Yet because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we too easily take our temperament as our destiny. We believe we simply are, in and of ourselves, people who micromanage or can’t get much pleasure out of sex, scream a lot when someone contradicts us or run away from lovers who are too kind to us. It may not be easy, but it is not alterable or up for enquiry.
The truth is likely to be more hopeful – though, in the short term, a great deal more uncomfortable. We are a certain way because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years ago. In the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement. Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded by material unreliability, we had to overachieve in relation to money and social prestige. Hurt by a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent pushed us towards our present meekness. Early overprotectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for a personality marked by exhausting attention-seeking behaviour.
There is always a logic and there is always a history.
We can tell that our imbalances date from the past because they reflect the ways of thinking and instincts of the children we once were. Our way of being unbalanced tends towards a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was once a young person’s attempt to grapple with something utterly beyond their capacities.
For example, when they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be very wrong with them. If someone humiliates, ignores or hurts them, it must – so it seems – be because they are, in and of themselves, imbecilic, repugnant and worth neglecting. It can take many years, and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially far less plausible conclusion: that the hurt was essentially undeserved and that there were inevitably a lot of other things going on, offstage, in the raging adult’s interior life, for which the child was entirely blameless.
Similarly, because children cannot easily leave an offending situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they so completely depend on. It becomes, in the infantile imagination, the child’s responsibility to mend the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop a wiser power to feel sad about, rather than eternally responsible for, those we love but cannot change. And perhaps, at points, in the interests of self-preservation, to move on.
Communication patterns are beset by comparable childhood legacies. When something is very wrong, children have no innate capacity to explain its cause. They lack the confidence, poise and verbal dexterity to get their points across with the calm and authority required. They tend to experience dramatic overreactions instead: insisting, nagging, exploding, screaming. Or else excessive under-reactions: sulking, sullen silence, avoidance. We may be well into middle age before we can shed our first impulses to explode at or flee from those who misunderstand our needs, and more carefully and serenely strive to explain them instead.
It is another feature of the emotional wounds of childhood that they tend to provoke what are in effect large-scale generalizations. Our wounds may have occurred in highly individual contexts: with one particular adult who hit his particular partner late at night in one particular terraced house in one town near the border. Or the wound may have been caused by one specific parent who responded with intense contempt after a specific job loss in one specific factory. But these events give rise to expectations of other people and life more broadly. We grow to expect that everyone will resort to violence, that every partner may turn on us and every money problem will unleash disaster. The character traits and mentalities that were formed in response to one or two central actors of childhood become our habitual templates for interpreting pretty much anyone. The always jokey and slightly manic way of being that we evolved so as to keep a depressed, listless mother engaged becomes our second nature. Even when she is long gone, we remain people who need to shine at every meeting, who require a partner to be continually focused on us and who cannot listen to negative or dispiriting information of any kind. We are living the wide-open present through the narrow drama of the past.
It is a complicating factor that our imbalances don’t cleanly reveal their origins, either to our own minds or, consequently, to the world at large. We aren’t really sure why we run away as we do, or are so often angry, or have a proud, haughty air, or break every deadline, or cling excessively to people we love. And because the sources of our imbalances escape us, we m
iss out on important sources of possible sympathy. We are judged on the behaviours that our wounds inspire, rather than on the wounds themselves. The damage may have begun with a feeling of invisibility, a poignant enough phenomenon, but to the world that doesn’t care to know more, we now just come across as somewhat sickening in our search for attention. Maybe the damage began with a truly unwarranted let-down, but now we simply appear unreasonable and controlling. Perhaps it started with a bullying, competitive father; now it seems as if we are just spineless.
We make our lives tougher than they should be because we insist on thinking of people, ourselves and others, as inept and mean rather than, as is almost invariably the case, primarily the victims of what we have all in some ways travelled through: an immensely tricky early history.
AMNESIA AND DENIAL
We can recall the basic facts and a few incidents of course, but in terms of grasping in detail, with visceral emotion, how our present is influenced by the personalities and circumstances of our early years, we’re often novices, or simply resolutely sceptical about the point of a close look backwards. It wouldn’t – in many cases – be too strong to speak of willed amnesia.
The School of Life Page 3