Margaret did not believe me. For her the shame was never ending.
But the pain for Margaret was not simply the shame she continued to feel for a misdemeanour the like of which many children at that age commit. If it is not sexual exploration it is stealing, or joy-riding, or, more dangerously, glue-sniffing. It would be a rare adult who could put their hand on their heart and swear that between the age of six and sixteen they had never broken the law or transgressed the moral code. For Margaret there was a greater problem.
One day she took me to task for never using her name when I was talking to her. I had to admit this. My style was never to use the name of the person I was talking to except when I wanted to attract their attention. I apologized to Margaret, and asked her why it was important that I use her name.
She said that it showed that I had not forgotten it and thus had not forgotten her. She told me how she felt that when she vanished from a person’s sight she vanished from that person’s memory. Whenever she returned to work she was surprised to find that the people there remembered her.
I said, ‘I always remember who you are when you arrive,’ and she responded, ‘That’s because you’ve written it in your diary.’
It was not just that she believed she was so insignificant that people did not remember her. Behind her anxiety was the fear that if everyone forgot her then her existence would cease. Most of the time she knew that believing that she existed only because other people thought of her and that she could vanish at any time was nonsense, but being left alone and forgotten was a fate she dreaded. Shame may have made her want to hide away, but shame also gave her the feeling that other people were observing her, and their gaze meant that she continued to exist. Shame strengthened her sense of existence and so she dared not relinquish it.8
In 1985 I wrote this story in the present tense. Now it must be told in the past tense, because for many years Margaret has led a happy life. She now has her own home and a loving partner, and she travels extensively worldwide. I have told the story of how she took charge of her life and changed in my book Breaking the Bonds.9
Many of us define ourselves in terms of our sense of guilt. A feeling of impending punishment can hang over us, like a Damoclean sword, ready to smite us for deeds done or which we have failed to do. While shame relates to our identity, the person that we are, and guilt to what we do, we can come to believe that everything we do is wrong and that we can never do anything properly, so that a sense of guilt, a pervasive sense of fear, can absorb our being to the extent that it becomes one of the structures by which we define ourselves. If we did not feel guilty we would not know what to do. As Constance once said to me, ‘I was born guilty’.
Some children acquire this sense of guilt when they come to feel that it was their fault that their mother died or their parents split up, even though these events occurred when the children were far too young to understand them. Most of us acquired our sense of guilt when, as small children, we found ourselves locked in combat with a parent over where and when we should defecate, or whether and what we would eat, or because our parent was punishing us and we did not understand why. We defended ourselves with anger and protest against a parent whom we saw as interfering and unjust. However, we could not win the battle and bring it to an end. We went on battling, and, as we did, we recognized that the situation was becoming increasingly dangerous. We felt very keenly that our parent was wicked to do this, but if that were so it meant that the person on whom we depended was wicked. This was terrible. We had to find some way of making ourselves safe.
Our solution was to accept our parent’s definition of the situation. Power is always about who does the defining and who accepts the definitions. So we acquiesced. We decided that we were wrong to see the situation as ‘I am being unfairly punished by my wicked parent’. The correct way to define the situation was ‘I am bad and am being justly punished by my good parent’, which was how our parent saw it.
This acceptance of our parent’s definition may have extricated us from that dangerous situation, but the price we paid was a lifelong sense of guilt. The sins of commission and omission became an integral part of our relationships with others and, knowing our badness, we have to strive to be good. Or else what will happen to us if we are not good? We shall be punished and abandoned.
This, as small children, is what we feared most of all, that our parents would abandon us and leave us alone, weak and defenceless in an alien world. We had learned what this was like when we were abandoned in our cot through a long, dark night and no one came to comfort us, or our mother left us with strangers and did not return for a long time. We heard the threat of abandonment when our parents told us of bad children being sent to children’s homes or of parents being driven to leave or even to die by their children’s wickedness. The most loving of parents can say in a moment of exasperation, ‘I can’t stand you a moment longer,’ or ‘You’ll be the death of me.’
Threats of abandonment do not diminish as a child gets older. A friend told me how, when he was nine and causing his mother some bother, she had packed a bag with his clothes and ordered him out of the house. He spent the day sitting at the front gate, hoping to be let back in again and promising to be very good. He is a man of unsurpassed goodness.
The fear of abandonment can underlie the whole of our experience of our existence, and because it is always there, allowing no contrast with periods without it, we do not conceptualize it clearly and consciously. Thus we do not ask why we have this fear now and whence it came.
Lorna had a nasty, life-threatening disease, cystic fibrosis, but she showed that by bravely and sensibly following a strict health regime this disease need not cut short one’s life nor prevent one from leading an ordinary existence. She had had to give up her work as a nurse but she had a loving, supportive husband, a wonderful daughter, a pleasant home, and a strong Christian faith which assured her that there was no reason to fear death. She could not understand why she should wake during the night consumed with panic, nor why a black depression should immobilize her in a way that her illness never did.
Nor could she understand why her GP wanted her to talk to me. But she dutifully came along, and discovered that talking to me gave her something important that was missing from her life. At home she was addressed as wife, mother, daughter, daughter in-law. Nobody talked to her. Now she had found someone who talked to her as her.
We talked about many things - the worry of her illness, the peculiarities of the medical profession, the responsibilities she carried for her family because she had always been the ‘sensible, well-organized, reliable one’. We talked a great deal about her need to do everything perfectly. Visitors had to be entertained with hot meals and home-made cakes. The garden must be trim and neat, the house immaculate. ‘I wouldn’t dream of going out and leaving the washing up not done or a bed unmade,’ she said.
I argued that she should let visitors fend for themselves and that housework should be kept to a minimum so that she had time and energy to do things which she found interesting and pleasant. At first she was doubtful, but one morning she told me, with triumph and laughter, ‘I went to church on Sunday without making the bed first but I closed the curtains so the neighbours couldn’t see.’
Why did she set herself such high standards and always strive to meet them? True, she had a mother who always expected her daughter to be perfect and a credit to her, but why had she accepted the enormous demands that her mother made on her?
One day, when she was telling me how fiercely she resisted going into hospital whenever her illness produced some complication, and how miserable she felt when she was there, she mentioned going into hospital when she was a child. I asked her about this and she described how she had been sent to a hospital when she was about seven. It was housed in a castle and run with military efficiency. Parents were not allowed to visit and children had to do what they were told. They had to be neat and tidy, obedient and reliable, and there were punishments if they were not. When her parents left her there she dared not cry because her mother disapproved of tears. She thought that she might never see her parents again,