to work. His lunch box was contaminated with urine and excrement. His safety was threatened in whispered phone calls that taunted him for ‘being a scab’. His injured foot was stamped on until it was bruised. But Willie never said a word about it to his wife because he did not want to worry her. ‘I knew nothing of what he was going through,’ she said yesterday. ‘That’s the way he was.’
Only since his death, at 41, has she learned of the harassment he suffered. Willie, married 16 years, will be buried today. His last words to his wife were ‘See you later’ and his last present was a model of a miner pushing a coal truck.1
We might wonder why Mrs Peacock had not noticed that something was amiss with her husband, but then many women collude with their spouses in pretending that they are strong, imperturbable, silent men. Such a collusion relieves the wife of the responsibility of taking her husband’s feelings into account. Many women believe without question the John Wayne myth that men never get frightened. Thus they can ignore the suffering that some men undergo and collude with the denial of fear which so many men try to achieve.
Denying other people’s pain is a popular and effective way of denying fear. If someone is in pain, then something fearful has happened. Acknowledging another person’s pain can make us frightened. We fear that the disaster that has happened to the other person could happen to us. Even if we can put this fear from us, assuring ourselves that we are safe, acknowledging another person’s pain arouses in us the sentiment of pity, which is itself a painful emotion. To limit the pain of our pity we rush to help the person in pain - we offer practical help, advice, money - but if there is nothing effective we can do we feel helpless, and this, too, is a painful and fearful state. We pride ourselves on being competent, and any situation which shows that we delude ourselves about our competence is indeed fearful and to be avoided.
Acknowledging another person’s pain can lead us not just to pity but to empathy, that leap of imagination which allows us to immerse ourselves in another person’s experience and to feel their emotions as our own. Thus we can share another person’s joy, but also another person’s pain and fear, and this can be undesirable. Roy, who was ashamed of the way tears would come suddenly and unbidden to his eyes when he was watching television, said, ‘Sometimes I see something, somebody in pain, and I feel their pain, just for a moment.’ Lonely as he was, he adamantly refused to join a self-help group for companionship. He could not bear, so Betty told me, to have to listen to people talking about their troubles.
Empathy is a precious human skill which not only prevents us from being cruel but joins us to others. When we experience empathy we are able, if only momentarily, to leave the loneliness of being and enter another person’s world.
However, to enter another person’s world can mean leaving the haven of safety we have built for ourselves and being forced to recognize that life is capricious, unfair and cruel. We then have to recognize that in pain we are jangled, confused, broken. Grief feels like fear, for in grief we find that the loss we have suffered has revealed that the picture of our life which we had built up was nothing but a fiction, which the loss has shattered. Our security has gone, and we do not know how to reconstruct it. Grief is painful, messy, and the people around us may not wish us to remind them of that.
If people persist in presenting their pain to us, if they will insist on crying, or looking miserable, or parading their grief or their emaciated bodies on our television screens, we can protect ourselves from the fear such sights may arouse in us by saying, ‘They brought it on themselves.’ Blaming the victim is one of the outcomes of the belief in a Just World, where invariably good people are rewarded and bad people punished. If someone is suffering, then this suffering must be the punishment the person deserves. Thus the rape victim should not have provoked her attacker, the beaten child should not have aggravated his parents, the starving tribespeople should have known that the drought would last. We are good and therefore bad things will not happen to us. However, when they do, when we become the victim, we have either to abandon our belief in the Just World and see its ways (and God’s) as capricious or mysterious beyond our comprehension, or else feel very guilty because we were bad, or very resentful because we have been punished unfairly.
Many people, not wishing to feel guilty and wanting to feel self-confident and proud of themselves, refuse to acknowledge another person’s anguish because they fear it will awaken their own anguish and weakness. Rhianon’s husband, a soldier with a distinguished war record, came along with her one day to instruct me to make her better. She was, he said, sick. She had no reason to be miserable and angry, yet there she was moping around the house and sometimes flying into a violent temper. She had even thrown a plate at him. He could not understand her behaviour. When I asked him about his feelings for her he said, ‘Of course I love her. She’s a fine wife.’ When I asked how they organized their domestic routine he said, ‘I help her with the shopping and her housework.’ He had no objection to her interest in music. It was a nice hobby, but, of course, ‘it’s natural for a woman to run a home and bring up children’. Rhianon wept, just as at home she wept in loneliness. He did not move to comfort her, just as at home he would never touch her. He said to me, ‘The sort of chap who puts his arm around his wife when she’s depressed is likely to get dragged down too. He wouldn’t be in charge any more.’
If being loving and caring is seen as weakness or as a way of being contaminated by the other person’s weakness, then another person’s need to be loved must indeed be denied. In the process of learning to be manly, many boys learn to define the loving, caring parts of themselves as feminine, weak and despicable, and so they have to deny that they have such attributes. Such a process of denial prevents them from understanding themselves, and so when in later life they sense within themselves the darkness of depression they are terrified. Rather than face what is inside them, they rush into some kind of frantic activity. They immerse themselves in work or sport, they have affairs with younger women, they take to drink. Anything rather than face their own fear and anguish. Many men in adult life still rely on a technique learned in boyhood, in Phillip Hodson’s words, ‘the happy knack of making themselves feel better by making others feel worse’,2 a technique which protects them from the pain and fear of observing another person’s pain.
Of course, women too can work at denying their own fear by denying other people’s anguish, even though it is not a defence which society expects a woman to be seen using. Women are supposed to be sensitive and caring, easily and foolishly distressed by another person’s suffering. Many women very effectively reduce the amount of suffering they allow themselves to observe and become frightened about by refusing to read newspapers or to watch the news on television, and by concentrating solely on themselves, their family and their friends. Such deliberate ignorance does not always lead to a happy life. Many women still sense the wider world as being chaotic and dangerous, threatening to destroy what they hold dear.
Women, too, do not find it easy to use the denial of fear which being competitive allows. Our society considers being competitive to be a masculine attribute. Fortunately there are now many women who reject this nonsense - delight in striving, competing and achieving is natural to all of us - and so both men and women can deal with their fear by putting all their energy and conscious thought into winning and defeating. Some competitive people wisely recognize that the fear is there and that striving, competing and achieving are an effective way of confronting and controlling the fear. However, some competitive people do not recognize this. They deny their fear, and then the fear returns in the guise of tension and anger which can disrupt all their relationships, competitive or not.
Just as competitive people are often irritable, so are powerful people, or those with aspirations to power. Becoming powerful is a much-favoured technique for denying one’s fear, be it becoming the dictator of a nation or merely the dictator of a family. Power can be described in different ways, such as having wealth or the ability to punish those who do not obey, but, in terms of denying fear, power can be thought of as the ability